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JT'-i 

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2 




THE GIRL NEXT DOOR 


BY THE SAME AUTHOR 


THE BOOK OF SUSAN 

“There is nothing commonplace about The 
Book of Susan/ Mr. Dodd writes in a fresh, 
entertaining style, and has shaped his mate¬ 
rials with no little skill.” 

—The New York Times. 

LILIA CHENOWORTH 

“A significant novel . . . not merely readable 
or merely entertaining .”—Chicago Daily News. 


E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY 





THE GIRL NEXT 

DOOR 

BEING THE CRABBED CHRONICLE 
OF A MISANTHROPE 

BY 

LEE WILSON DODD 

>1 

Author of “The Book of Susan,” etc. 



o > 

NEW YORK 

E 4 P. DUTTON & COMPANY 
681 Fifth Avenue 


z, 










Copyright, 1923, 

By E. P. Dutton & Company 


All Rights Reserved 



'b i ^ ^ t o 
3 


t 


« 


PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 




TO 

HENRY SEIDEL CANBY 

Dear Henry: 

“No man writes a booh without meaning something ” 
Addison said so. It was very nice of him. I don’t see 
how you can question his authority. And I hope you 
may not presently be moved to try. 

Ever affectionately yours, 

L. W. Z). 





The Girl Next Door 


i 

O F all the women in the world,” says 
the Chinese poet, “the most beauti¬ 
ful are the women of the land of 
Ch’u. And in all the land of Ch’u there are 
none like the women of my own village. 
And in my village there are none that can be 
compared with the girl next door.” 

But in my village, alas, the girl next 
door is of mongrel descent—short-legged, 
swarthy-faced, with pert manners, a loud 
whining voice, and an expression at once— 
if that be possible—smug and vicious and 
vacant. In my village there are few beings 
I more gladly avoid than the girl next door. 
“An’ he says to me, he says-” 

I object to a civilization that flowers in 

1 



2 


The Girl Next Door 


such monstrosities as the girl next door. 
How much pleasanter to have been born 
centuries ago in the land of Ch’u! Or better 
still in Athens, just in time, say, to have at¬ 
tended in one’s young -manhood the Iphi- 
genia in Tauris of Euripides! 

“An’ he says to me, he says-” 

I protest against the girl next door, 
against all that has made her possible! I am 
a highbrow; I am an assthete; I am an aris¬ 
tocrat ; and I am unashamed. But my single 
small room—bedroom and sitting room in 
one—is humbler that that. It neither flat¬ 
ters my prejudices nor encourages my pre¬ 
tensions. it is just a single small room. 

“An’ he says to me, he says, ‘why do yeh 
chew gum?’ he says. The ol’ stiff!” 

“The noive of him!” 

“Say, believe me—you said it!” 

All this wafted from a side yard to my 
open window; purposely, for the reference 
is to me, and it is desired it should reach me. 




The Girl Next Door 


3 


I sit writing at my open window and I 
look down upon—oh, how I look down 
upon!—the girl next door and a gen’leman 
friend of the girl next door. 



II 


I F that ignorant and unseemly couple, the 
girl next door and her gen’leman friend, 
were an isolated phenomenon I should 
feel more hopeful about human progress 
and the perfectibility of the ape. But wher¬ 
ever I turn in my village they and their kind 
surround me. I admit, you see, that I am 
an intellectual snob, a quite insufferable 
person, convinced of my superiority to most 
of my present neighbors. There are just 
three persons in the village who are my 
superiors, and not more than five or six 
others who are my equals. True, it is not a 
large village; it numbers, I believe, some 
two thousand — hypothetical — souls. Its 
name is Oakdale Terrace; and it is one of a 
chain of cheap suburban land developments 

strung along some arid heights above an un- 

4 


The Girl Next Door 


5 


wholesome marsh, not twenty minutes by 
train from the financial capital of the world, 
New York. 

And please to consider the name of this 
village—Oakdale Terrace! Can a dale be a 
terrace—or a terrace a dale? But whether 
one or the other, why should the name of a 
noble forest tree, nonexistent in the vicinity, 
be attached to it? If the name of a place 
must be descriptive of its situation—I do not 
say it must—then Swamp Ledge would not 
he inappropriate for this—as advertised— 
“garden city.” I admit that a swamp can¬ 
not be a ledge; but a rock ledge may shoul¬ 
der out from a swamp and offer a possible 
retreat. And such a retreat, in our poverty, 
of purse or of aspiration, is ours. 

On filled-in ground between the ledge and 
the swamp runs the railroad, whose over¬ 
crowded commutation-ticket trains bear at 
least half of us each morning, save Sunday, 
to our labors in New York, returning us 




6 


The Girl Next Door 


each evening more or less in time for dinner 
at seven. Some of us even dine so tardily 
as eight, not for fashion, but from necessity. 
A little beyond our shabby station, spur 
tracks of this prosperous—but I am told it 
is merely busy, not prosperous—and there¬ 
fore dirty railroad lead to a somewhat wider 
space of filled land, whereon smoke and 
clamor three small factories — local enter¬ 
prises of no very high commercial standing. 
The product of the largest of these bears 
the trade name of INTuxone. It combines, I 
am assured, all the advantages of a cooling 
and palatable summer beverage with valu¬ 
able tonic, blood-purifying and nutritive 
elements. It contains—and this I think is 
certain — no habit-forming drugs. It is 
charged heavily with carbonic-acid gas. 
And it retails—ask any drug store not too 
distant from the source of supply — at a 
nickel a drink; yes, even now, with Europe 
in flames and our profiteers raging. The 


The Girl Next Door 


7 


girl next door, whose father labors in that 
vineyard, prefers it to ice-cream soda—any 
day. 

Our three local magnates are majority 
stockholders in Nuxone. They are also the 
principal owners and directors of our build¬ 
ing-loan association. They are also- 

But what are they not? 

Of the two smaller factories one produces 
a much-patented but little-distributed form 
of piston ring, and the other a garden insec¬ 
ticide which has in addition, at no increased 
cost per gallon, all the properties—includ¬ 
ing, as I can daily testify, the pervasive reek 
—of a “general commercial fertilizer.” 



Ill 


W HEN I spoke of the three persons 
in Oakdale Terrace who are my 
superiors, I was not referring to 
our three local magnates. No, I had then in 
mind three quite different beings—a spin¬ 
ster, a housewife, and a boy of eighteen. 

They just happen to live under one roof, 
the housewife’s; but they are not related. 
The housewife—possessing a husband who 
long since reached the limits of his energy 
and ambition, and two young children who 
have not even begun to suspect there are 
limits to anything—does all her own work, 
and lets out three rooms besides; she also 
furnishes board if requested—and she is al¬ 
ways requested—to their fortunate inmates. 
I have one of these rooms, the spinster has 

another, and the boy of eighteen has the 

8 



The Girl Next Door 


9 


smallest and third. Thus, you observe, all 
that ic really superior in Oakdale Terrace 
has, by some pull of occult forces, drawn 
together and made common cause against a 
common foe—the girl next door, to wit, and 
all she typifies and suggests. 

The housewife’s name is Mrs. Kingery. 
The spinster’s name is Miss Miniter. Bela 
Hrdlika is the astonishing name of the boy 
of eighteen. My own name—if it be my 
own—is Axson Ellwood. Even our names, 
you will note, are intensely individual, have 
a distinguishing flavor. They are not rub¬ 
ber-stamp names. 

Mrs. Kingery’s position I have made 
clear. Miss Miniter corrects proof and 
reads manuscripts for Garnett & Co., the 
New York publishers, an ancient and con¬ 
servative firm. Bela Hrdlika assists in some 
minor capacity the almost human machinery 
that mixes and bottles up Nuxone. 

As for the writer of these lines, he is a 


10 The Girl Next Door 

man of mystery, both to himself—for to 
ourselves we are always mysterious—and to 
his fellow villagers. There are a number of 
local theories cunningly devised to account 
for him; not all of them complimentary. It 
is said that if all were known—and so on. 
But all that is known in Oakdale Terrace 
can be put in a sentence: He arrived there 
one summer afternoon of the year 1918, de¬ 
scending at a deserted station from a little- 
used train; walked thence up the blistering 
slope of Maple Shade Avenue to Fairview 
Boulevard, our principal artery of com¬ 
merce; entered Mitchell’s drug store and 
requested the proprietor to be so kind as 
to tell him where a clean, cheap room could 
be obtained; walked at once, after due di¬ 
rection, to the modest home of Mrs. Kin- 
gery, and has remained in that desirable 
haven ever since. The writer of these lines 
is—so much, at least, I dare reveal—a man 
of forty; allowing for a possible year or so 


The Girl Next Door 11 

either side of the round number. He wears 
neat but ready-made clothes; and though he 
has been reported by the girl next door to be 
“alius writin’ som’pn,” he seems to have no 
visible means of support. He pays his room 
rent and board bills, however, promptly, and 
invariably in cash. Not an ill-looking man, 
his neighbors admit; but rather surly; likes 
to keep pretty much to himself. Unques¬ 
tionably, if all were known- 



IV 


S OMETIMES in the evening, as ten 
o’clock approaches, I decide that Miss 
Miniter’s eyes need a rest, so I step 
across the hall and knock at her door. She 
always asks me to come in, and I always 
find her stretched out on a morris chair, 
its back well lowered, reading interminable 
manuscripts through great round spectacles 
with black tortoise-shell rims. Beside her on 
the low tabouret that supports her reading 
lamp are a bowl of matches, an after-dinner 
coffee cup used for an ash tray, and a box 
containing the remnants of her last hundred 
cigarettes. And on these occasions her un¬ 
slippered, black-silk-stockinged feet are in¬ 
variably pillowed on a haphazard pile of 
nondescript sofa cushions. Miss Miniter is 

not an orderly person, and she admits that 

12 


The Girl Next Door 


13 


for her the flesh and the devil have been re¬ 
duced to two worldly passions: Other than 
silk stockings she will not wear, and other 
than the finest and mildest imported Tur¬ 
kish she will not smoke. By indulging her¬ 
self passionately in these respects she has 
managed, she tells me, to quiet and dismiss 
all her other vicious propensities. 

I like Miss Miniter. She is only a little 
past thirty, I should say; well, possibly, 
thirty-five. Not a pretty woman at all; in 
fact, I fear that her nose is rather too high 
and thin and sweepingly arched not to run 
some danger, in her later years, of resem¬ 
bling a beak. But if so it will never re¬ 
semble a ferocious, vulturine beak; and no 
one, when she consents to remove those 
impossible spectacles, has a pair of more- 
eager-to-be-amused, perhaps-ever-sq-slight- 
ly-satirical eyes. I have never quite made 
out their color to my satisfaction. If I call 
them hazel you will think them green or a 


14 


The Girl Next Door 

muddy brown. If I call them green freckled 
with gold you will think me mad. Well, 
why not, after all? I prefer to run the lat¬ 
ter chance; devotion to truth constrains me. 
Pending further examination, I hazard the 
statement that they are green freckled with 
gold. 

Miss Miniter has no hesitation in admit¬ 
ting me to her room for a ten-o’clock chat. 
She seems never to have had even a bowing 
acquaintance with the Grundy family; cer¬ 
tainly I have never heard her mention them. 
And she never talks about being emanci¬ 
pated either; she moves in another world 
from all that, the world of her own serene 
tolerance and implicit self-respect. When I 
enter, if the hall is drafty, as it usually is, 
she asks me to shut the door. I shut the 
door. Then she holds out the box contain¬ 
ing the remnant of her last hundred. I light 
such a cigarette as I am seldom privileged 
these days to enjoy, sink into an ancient 


The Girl Next Door 


15 


upholstered armchair that has relinquished 
all its pretensions to anything but solid com¬ 
fort, and stretch my feet out before me with 
a contented sigh. The contentment of my 
sigh always lights an answering smile of 
good fellowship in the eyes of Miss Miniter; 
she removes her grotesque spectacles and 
lets the interminable manuscript or long 
yellow sheets of galley proof slip from her 
hands. 

“Well, man of mystery,” she queries, 
“what are the latest bulletins from the girl 
next door?” 

This has become a sort of game between 
us, far more amusing than cribbage or bezi- 
que. I invent grotesque horrors which I 
allege to have been perpetrated by the girl 
next door, with the assistance of her gen’le- 
man friend. Sometimes I do not have to 
invent them. Miss Miniter knows instinc¬ 
tively when I am lying and when I am not, 
and like a true appreciator of the arts much 


16 The Girl Next Door 

prefers a good plausible lie to a stodgy, im¬ 
plausible fact—any day. This is because 
she is at bottom, as I am, a merciless lover 
of truth; for there is but one way of express¬ 
ing adequately the inner truth of persons or 
things or institutions; to wit, by symbols. It 
is only the gorgeous liars who bring us face 
to face with reality. Well, I am not so 
gorgeous a liar as that; I wish I might claim 
the deathless distinction! But on occasion I 
develop a considerable flair and can impro¬ 
vise free fantasias not wholly unworthy of 
my betters. So, at least, Miss Miniter is 
pleased to assure me. 

“Did you know,’’ I ask, “that the girl 
next door is gradually and very subtly lur¬ 
ing on her gen’leman friend to the commis¬ 
sion of a terrible crime?” 

“Is she, indeed!” exclaims Miss Miniter, 
one sparkle of immediate interest, and en¬ 
tirely prepared to enter into that blessed 
state first discovered and described by Cole- 


The Girl Next Door 


17 


ridge, the “sort of temporary half-faith” 
which enables us to see a forest even when 
we know we are not looking at its trees. 

As the cover of Miss Monroe’s brave little 
magazine. Poetry, informs us each month, 
through the voice of Whitman: “To have 
great poets there must be great audiences 
too.” Miss Miniter’s greatness as an audi¬ 
ence is unsurpassed; she gives far more than 
she receives; and if I do not rise to the 
heights of poetry in her presence I hereby 
solemnly affirm that the fault is not hers. 
Whose the fault may be, remains a little dry 
bone to pick between me and a too indif¬ 
ferent cosmos. 

“Is she, indeed!” exclaims Miss Miniter. 

“Such is my haunting fear,” I respond. 
“It seems that her gen’leman friend is at 
present employed as a messenger by Sim¬ 
ons, Simons & Epstein, a racially successful 
bond and brokerage firm on Broad Street. 
It is his daily, in fact his hourly, duty to tote 


18 The Girl Next Door 

thousands of dollars’ worth of bonds from 
the offices of his firm to the offices of other 
equally successful firms in the financial dis¬ 
trict. He carries these bonds in a small 
suitcase, and he is permitted to carry also 
an automatic pistol in his right hip pocket. 
Should he be attacked en route by despera¬ 
does, it is his further duty to flourish—even, 
if necessary, to discharge—the said pistol; in 
short, he is intrusted—though why he should 
be, Simons, Simons & Epstein will one day 
wonder as much as I do—with a consider¬ 
able responsibility for the safe conduct 
through crowded streets of very large sums 
in negotiable securities, hopefully so called. 
This responsibility, so far as I can discover, 
sits upon him lightly enough; he is rather 
proud of it, however, and likes to enlarge 
upon it and sketch lurid scenarios of the 
constant danger he runs; this enables him, 
he fondly imagines, to pose as a hero in the 
hyena eyes of the girl next door. Poor in- 



The Girl Next Door 19 

fatuated youth! His hour has struck, though 
he heard not the bell 

“You are misquoting Meredith/’ warns 
Miss Miniter with disapproval. 

“For the pleasure of having my audacity 
detected. But I proceed. Through my 
open window, past midnight, I have lately 
caught sundry scraps of conversation that 
strike me as significant and sinister. Per¬ 
haps a week ago, for example, I was lying 
on my penitential sofa near the window; a 
clock, I recall, had just struck one.” 

“Why were you not sound asleep in 
bed, man of mystery? You ought to have 
been.” 

“True. But you can’t expect a man of 
mystery to have even the remnants of a good 
conscience. Such a being. Miss Miniter—as 
you must know, having survived the con¬ 
sumption of more novels monthly for years 
than any one other heroine recorded in his¬ 
tory-” 




20 


The Girl Next Door 


“I’m not recorded in-” 

“You will be. But you put me off. My 
point is, the small hours of the morning are 
the classic hours for remorse, an emotion 
entirely en regie for mysterious strangers. 
You must grant me the ordinary privileges 
of my role. Thank you.” For Miss Miniter 
had gleamed assent. “There, then, was I, 
hard by the open window, and harried by 
whatever private devils you choose to sus¬ 
pect. And presently I heard stealthy foot¬ 
steps padding along the heat-softened as¬ 
phalt of the side yard. They ceased, almost 
immediately below me. Then voices—un¬ 
dertoned, underbred voices—to this effect: 

“ ‘Gee, that was a swell ride all right!’ 

“ ‘Some party, huh?’ 

“ ‘Quit, can’t yeh? Be good.’ 

“ ‘That las’ shimmy, eh Sade!’ 

“‘Kelker jazz!’ You discern the influ¬ 
ence of the war? ‘Say, Bert, I wisht we 
could go there often—you an’ me—huh?’ 





Xhe Girl Next Door 21 

“ ‘No chance, girly. Roadhouses nothin’! 
They’re highway robbers.’ 

“ ‘Well, they suit me.’ 

“ ‘Me too. But I’m not a gold mine. Not 
yet.’ 

“‘Yer woikin’ fer one! Ain’t that the 
truth?’ 

“ ‘Sure. At fifteen per. Know what this 
blow-out cost me—car an’ all—huh? Two 
weeks cold.’ 

“ ‘I’ll say yer no piker, Bert.’ 

“ ‘Thanks for the ad!’ 

“ ‘Aw, quit!’ 

“ ‘I sure am nutty about you, kid.’ 

“ ‘Say, Bert?’ 

“ ‘Huh?’ 

“ ‘It’d be nice if we c’d have a car every 
night.’ 

“ ‘Aw, turn over! Yer talkin’ in yer sleep, 
girly.’ 

“ ‘Well, I ain’t never goin’ to marry no¬ 
body that can’t keep a car. That’s flat.’ 



22 


'The Girl Next Door 

“ 'Stop yer kiddin’!’ 

“ ‘I ain’t kiddin’—I’m tellin’ yeh.’ 

“ ‘See yeh t’morr’ night, huh?’ 

“ ‘Mebbe. If Carl don’t bring his new 
breezer round. I kind-a think he will, at 
that. Nix! I gotta go in. On yer way 
now!’ 

“ ‘Carl! If he’s got a car he must of stole 
it!’ 

“ ‘Well, I should worry. That’s his fu¬ 
neral then; it ain’t mine. I guess what I 
don’t know won’t hurt me, will it? Carl’s 
clever all right. I guess a clever guy can 
alius find more’n one way of pickin’ up a 
little extra change—if he reely loves a girl. 
S’long, Bert.’ 

“ ‘By.’ ” 

“You have a remarkable memory,” smiles 
Miss Miniter. 

“Yet the half has not been told! Ah, 
please don’t worry. I’m quite aware your 
training as a professional reader of embryo 


The Girl Next Door 


23 


best sellers makes it unnecessary for me to 
go on. You’ve already foreseen the loom¬ 
ing catastrophe. Almost any morning now 
we shall share the horror of it with Mr. Kin- 
gery as a front-page sensation. But just 
how many thousand dollars’ worth of Lib¬ 
erty Bonds do you suppose he’ll make off 
with? Bert, I mean; and he’s no piker, re¬ 
member! I’ll take either side of fifty thou¬ 
sand and bet you a chocolate nut sundae at 
Mitchell’s on the reported amount. Are you 
on?” 

“No,” said Miss Miniter gravely. “I 
shall ask Mrs. Kingery to move you to an¬ 
other room to-morrow, even if I have to 
change rooms with you myself. You’re de¬ 
generating, man of mystery. Your char¬ 
acter is disintegrating under contact with the 
manners and customs of the girl next door. 
A chocolate nut sundae at World-War 
prices! What speculative madness! Now if 
you had been more restrained—if you had 
offered to bet me a Nuxone——” 



V 


T HE boy, Bela Hrdlika, is an astonish¬ 
ing boy; quite as astonishing as his 
name; he is also a disturbing boy. He 
is tall, of slight, wiry build, and his whole 
being is compacted of nervous intensities. 
A black boy, too; black haired, black eye¬ 
browed, black eyelashed; but with eyes of 
blue witch-fire—wonderful! Not a Slavic 
type, I should say; though the attempt to 
pin definite physical characteristics to our 
mongrel European races is always a little 
absurd. He has shown me photographs both 
of his father and his mother; it is his mother, 
chiefly, he resembles, and I believe she has 
more than a dash of Irish blood in her. His 
father was a Bohemian, in both senses of 
the word—born, that is, in Prague; edu¬ 
cated —on se sent de son education —in the 

24 


The Girl Next Door 25 

Latin Quarter; and finally buried at the 
expense of the state of New Jersey. 

At least three out of every five man chil¬ 
dren born in Prague can play on the violin 
like fallen angels; one out of every five, like 
Satan himself. Bela’s father seems to have 
belonged to this latter gifted minority. He 
also painted anaemic nymphs and shadowy 
satyrs and symbolic serpents, disposing 
them in nightmarish landscapes largely 
made up of dark cold pools, baleful crags, 
and writhen lightning-blasted pines. He 
also drank absinthe, while he could more 
easily and cheaply obtain it, and only took 
to cocaine as a protest, when the distillation 
of absinthe was threatened with suppression. 
On absinthe he had merely neglected his mis¬ 
tress and her one child and had failed to sup¬ 
port them; on cocaine he took to beating 
them as well. This he did, with more or less 
regularity, for five years. 

Then his mistress, who had once upon a 


26 The Girl Next Door 


time run away from a, to her, unsympa¬ 
thetic husband to join her destiny with this 
fascinating Czech, decided—having an ever 
young and ardent heart—to run away a 
second time from a no longer agreeable sit¬ 
uation. And she did this so successfully, 
seven or eight months ago, that Bela has 
not the slightest idea where to search for 
her; though he tells Mrs. Kingery that, 
being passionately fond of his mother, he 
means to begin a world-wide search just as 
soon as he has been able to save up one hun¬ 
dred dollars. As he has managed to lay 
aside eighty-four or -five dollars during the 
past six months, he now looks forward to 
beginning this world-wide search by Christ¬ 
mas. And, after all, he is quite alone in the 
world and can do as he likes. Yes; the fas¬ 
cinating Czech, too, has vanished. Shortly 
after Bela’s mother had left him, he ab¬ 
sorbed an overdose of cocaine and died most 
unpleasantly, leaving Bela the refuse of his 


27 


The Girl Next Door 

wardrobe, and just one article of value—his 
violin. Fortunately for Miss Miniter and 
Mrs. Kingery and me, however, Bela can¬ 
not play the violin. He has seemingly, in 
defiance of race or heredity, no ear for music 
whatever. Yet he will not sell the violin. 
And there’s a reason for that; or an absurd 
unreason. 

He will not sell the violin—it is not, as it 
should be for purposes of romance, a rare 
old Stradivarius; I don’t know what it is; 
but it looks a fine instrument, and Bela says 
he has been offered a thousand for it—be¬ 
cause he has convinced himself that it be¬ 
longs really, beyond possibility of alienation, 
to an evil power, a discarnate and malevol¬ 
ent spirit; perhaps the spirit of the man who 
made it, or of its first jealous owner. His 
father had obtained it from the widow of a 
chef d’orchestre in Trouville; she hated to 
part with it, but her poor Camille, having en¬ 
joyed his treasure a scant two months —he 


28 


The Girl Next Door 


had picked it up, she said, at Budapest, from 
the blind daughter of a suicide—her poor 
Camille, in short, had gone stark, staring 
mad. And Bela well knows that very shortly 
after the elder Hrdlika had come into posses¬ 
sion of this violin he contracted the cocaine 
habit, and a bad case of nostcdgie de la boue, 
and pretty rapidly brought his family down 
with him into the mire. Moreover, Bela as¬ 
sures Miss Miniter—on the authority of his 
mother, who surely ought to have known— 
that no one can play on this sinister fiddle 
without at once feeling all his most secret 
and terrible impulses stir in their dark under¬ 
caves and stretch themselves, as it were, for 
action; and he insists, of his own knowledge, 
that no one can so much as hear it played 
without—well, says Bela, without longing 
suddenly to strangle his sweetheart, or set 
fire to a poor man’s cottage, or torture the 
pure heart of a child. 

He is quite definite about all this. He 



s» 


The Girl Next Door 29 

states these things as simple facts for ac¬ 
ceptance—so, and so, and so. The violin is 
haunted, accursed; and he is its unhappy 
guardian—for life. He feels, you see, that 
so long as he cannot play on it it cannot 
harm him; and he will not risk its harming 
others less fortunate. The money it rep¬ 
resents would be more than welcome, of 
course; for Bela longs to super-educate him¬ 
self and soar beyond the very ken of Oak¬ 
dale Terrace and Nuxone; but to sell such 
a violin, he asserts, would be a dastardly 
crime. 

“Why not destroy it, then?” Miss Miniter 
once suggested. 

“Yes,” Bela answered her, “ why not? If 
it were smashed to splinters, hein? Burned 
to ashes? But I can’t do it—can’t make 
myself do it! I’ve tried, more than once; I 
have indeed! But when it comes to the very 
moment, I—oh, why not admit it!—I’m too 
horribly afraid!” 


30 


The Girl Next Door 


“Of what, Bela?” 

“Of—him.” 

“Your father?” 

“No. The other one—the first.” 

“I see. You think he’d contrive to be 
revenged somehow?” 

“Wouldn’t he!” 

“Well—assuming that he exists!” 

“Do I exist!” exclaimed Bela impatiently. 
“Do you!” 

“Perhaps,” smiled Miss Miniter. “Who 
knows?” 

Bela’s blue eyes flamed and narrowed; his 
black brows drew together. 

“I tell you he is in this room with us now.” 

“What! You see him?” 

“No. But I am growing angry with you! 
That’s his doing, Miss Miniter; he works in 
that way—always.” 

Then the boy drew in a long breath and 
smiled again—his peculiar, tense, unboyish 
smile. 


The Girl Next Door 


31 


“There. For the present, he is gone. He 
has little power over me, I thank God. Be¬ 
cause I am tone deaf. I cannot play.” 

Miss Miniter told me that he made these 
final assertions stubbornly; as if seeking to 
convince some incredulous third party to 
their conversation that he was tone deaf and 
could not play. 


VI 

M RS. KLNTGERY was able to explain 
to me how it had been possible for 
Bela, within half a year, and out of 
a daily wage of two dollars, to save eighty- 
four dollars and a few pennies over. In the 
first place, she is not merely his landlady— 
Mrs. Kingery could not be merely anyone’s 
landlady—she is his motherly friend. In 
the second, she is his private banker—by 
request. Each Saturday evening on his 
return from the factory Bela deposits with 
her nine dollars, retaining from his week’s 
wages three dollars for his personal neces¬ 
sities—clothes, and repairs to same; tooth 
paste, when needed; an occasional pad of 
cheap paper, an occasional pencil, and so 
on. Out of the nine dollars Mrs. King- 

32 



The Girl Next Door 


33 


ery lodges, boards and launders Bela, and 
lays aside any surplus in cash to his ac¬ 
count. That is why Bela has been able to 
save eighty-four dollars and a few pennies 
over. 

“But, Mrs. Kingery,” said I, shaking my 
head at her, “while I am not impeccable at 
figures I think I detect a slight discrepancy 
between the present cost of living and the 
sum you have personally retained as Bela’s 
landlady? Let’s see; nine dollars a week— 
that’s, roughly, $225 for six months; eighty- 
four dollars from $225 leaves $141; or, 
$23.50 a month, a little less than six dollars 
weekly. That might possibly cover the mere 
cost of the very considerable amount of ex¬ 
cellent food Bela consumes; but I fail to see, 
Mrs. Kingery, how it can also cover room 
rent, laundry, and a modest margin of profit 
to you. Particularly, Mrs. Kingery, as you 
came to Miss Miniter and me not a month 
ago, almost with tears in your eyes, and 


34 


The Girl Next Door 


humbly begged our pardon for something 
entirely out of your control—namely, the 
fact that you could no longer lodge and 
board us at fifteen dollars a week each, ex¬ 
clusive of laundry, without grave danger of 
landing your husband and children in the 
County Home. How do you explain away 
this discrepancy, Mrs. Kingery?” 

The sprightly little woman, ordinarily so 
cheerful in the midst of her anxieties, now 
blushed—very pretty she looked, too, doing 
it; and five years younger—hung her head, 
and avoided my grim glance of inquisition. 
She hadn’t a word to say for herself—not 
one. So I denounced her. 

“The fact is, Mrs. Kingery, you have 
ceased to be businesslike in your dealings 
with that young man. You’ve taken to re¬ 
garding him, almost, as a son. Can you 
deny it?” 

She could not deny it. But she could, and 
did, offer a few halting excuses. 


The Girl Next Door 


35 


“No father — nobody of his own — and 
when I found his mother’d left him, too— 
and he’s not one to get on fast—he’s like 
Kingery—he can’t push and shove and be 
mean to folks—that’s what’s needed, worse 
luck—it’d be a better world if it wasn’t— 
but that’s how it is—and the nicer you are, 
as I’m always saying to Kingery, and much 
good it does, but it’s a habit I can’t break— 
the less you get for it—that boy, now— 
twelve a week’s no wages for a dog these 
days, and so I tell him—but he says it’s the 
only reason they keep him on—they’ve no 
union labor out there — it’s a scrooching, 
skinflint business and a scab shop—well— 
you can see he was meant to be a gentle¬ 
man—and the beautiful pictures he draws 
after hours—and no complaints out of him 

—I haven’t the heart-” 

“No, Mrs. Kingery,” I agreed, “it’s your 
most conspicuous failing. You haven’t, as 
you say, the heart.” 



36 


The Girl Next Door 


“Well, but who would—with a boy like 
that? What’s to become of him? And a 
face many a girl will dream about.” 

“And a few not so young, eh?” 

“Aha, Mr. Ellwood,” sighed Mrs. King- 
ery, “what could she have been like now, 
his mother? With that darlin’ face of hers? 
I never go to his room that I don’t feast my 
eyes on it. There I stand by the bureau and 
stare at her. And not a word out of him 
against her! Aha, Mr. Ellwood—the wick¬ 
edness of the world—the wickedness of the 
world.” Then, very softly but firmly: 
“Kath-leen! You’ll break that in another 
minute! There—I said so! Oh, did she 
cuttums fin’er—the poor baby!” 

Business, as I retreat from the room, of 
kissing Kathleen’s slightly scratched right 
index finger; Kathleen, aged seven, is her 
youngest, most stolidly mischievous and 
least appreciative child. Later business, too, 
I presume, of sweeping up the fragments of 



37 


The Girl Next Door 

some perishable object. But no still later 
and more necessary business—I feel certain, 
alas!—of soundly spanking Kathleen. Al¬ 
ready I observe in Kathleen certain ten¬ 
dencies more fully and ripely developed in 
the girl next door. 

When I mentioned Mrs. Kingery as my 
superior I did not mean my superior in 
cynicism. She fails there, rather badly. 
But there are other qualities of mind and 
heart rarer, and perhaps more admirable, in 
an overtaxed and underaffectioned planet. 
I admit that Mrs. Kingery is a foolishly in¬ 
dulgent, self-immolating wife, mother and 
landlady. But a woman with sufficient re¬ 
serves of sweetness to be a foolishly indul¬ 
gent wife, mother and landlady, while scrub¬ 
bing and baking and cooking and washing 
and making beds and setting to rights and 
so on a trifle less than twenty-four hours a 
day—well, who am I even to touch the hem 
of her gingham apron? Her clean gingham 



38 The Girl Next Door 

apron, too, remember! I have never seen 
her wear one that was not clean. 

It is true that she finds little time for 
reading or philosophical reflection; but she 
is not the less proud of Kingery’s weakness 
for subscription editions. He is paying in¬ 
stallments now—her little way of telling me 
she is!—on three elegant sets: The Tales and 
Novels of Guy de Maupassant, richly illus¬ 
trated, and kept, therefore, pending a fur¬ 
ther growth in grace of Bob, aged nine, 
under lock and key; Famous Pages from 
Famous Authors; and an Illustrated His¬ 
tory of the Great War, in weekly parts, 
which are accumulating so rapidly that Mrs. 
Kingery says, “either one of two things, 
those albums, Kingery, or the phonograph, 
will have to go!” In her husband’s heavy 
presence this is the one definite complaint I 
have heard her utter; and it surprised him 
into sudden resentment. 

“If I’d had more edycation in me youth. 


The Girl Next Door 


39 


woman, there’d be a grand pianny an’ Kath¬ 
leen playin’ on it in the parlor now! Lack 
of edycation—that’s what drags down the 
prolytar-yut,” muttered Kingery. 

“The man’s right, too,” responded Mrs. 
Kingery with a propitiatory smile. 


yn 


I T was from Bela via Miss Miniter in 
part, in part from Bela via Mrs. King- 
ery, that I learned something of Bela’s 
history during the interval between his 
mother’s disappearance and his establish¬ 
ment with the Kingery family in Oakdale 
Terrace. 

At the time of his mother’s flight he was 
living, wretchedly enough, with his parents 
in the forlorn attic of a second-rate road¬ 
house not far from Trenton, New Jersey. 
These cold, utterly comfortless quarters had 
been turned over to them by Bud Belcher, 
proprietor of the roadhouse, who also fur¬ 
nished them with three more or less left-over 
meals a day. In return for these privileges 
it was the duty of Hrdlika, senior, to play 

on his violin during the dinner hour and 

40 


The Girl Next Door 


41 


throughout the evening, accompanied on a 
disintegrating piano by Mile. d’Aubigny— 
a name adopted for this temporary profes¬ 
sionalism by Bela’s mother. She was an ac¬ 
complished musician, but badly handicapped 
by an impossible instrument. Anton Hrd- 
lika’s instrument, as we know, was superb; 
and his command of it, when he could com¬ 
mand himself, was magical. He could do 
so, however, but one or two evenings out of 
seven; though his playing at its worst had a 
quality seldom or never met with in road¬ 
houses of any grade. 

The fame of the crazy fiddler at Bel¬ 
cher’s joint became locally very great, and 
Bud’s far from select patronage increased 
rapidly, improving somewhat in tone. The 
beauty of Mile. d’Aubigny—she was then 
thirty-five, but looked ten years younger in 
spite of her many sorrows—was also much 
appreciated and discussed by Bud’s patrons; 
particularly by a group of forlornly left- 


42 


The Girl Next Door 


over Princeton seniors, pronounced unwar¬ 
worthy, who took to running over to Bud’s 
on Saturday nights and more or less mon¬ 
opolizing his limited tables. Naturally they 
did their best to flirt a little with Mile. d’Au- 
bigny, but without encouraging success. 

As if feeling it part of her contract she 
would yield a sad half smile now and again, 
or a pathetic lift of eyes; that was all. Bud, 
a coarse-grained citizen, true product of the 
underworld, rather frowned on her for this 
coldness; thought it wouldn’t hurt her, or his 
trade, if she loosened up a little; but he was 
on the whole well satisfied with his acquisi¬ 
tions and made the most of his prosperity 
while it lasted. No one knew better than he 
that, given the habits and temperament of 
Anton Hrdlika, it could not last very long. 

There were occasional evenings — they 
tended to grow more frequent—when An¬ 
ton simply would not or could not play. On 
the morning following the first of these 


The Girl Next Door 


43 


lapses Bud had attempted to give him hell; 
he never attempted it again. “Honest,” 
wheezed Bud Belcher, in his weary asth¬ 
matic way, “I t’ought dat guy’d have a knife 
in me. I could’a’ beaned him all right; but 
why would I t’row away a gold mine like 
dat! Not on yer picher! If he can’t spiel 
after dis, he can’t—an’ if he won’t he won’t. 
Hat’s all der is to it.” 

Ragtime, or its Ttth power, jazz, is of 
course the musical staple of roadhouses; but 

Anton left that “sacree espece de -” to 

three disconsolate colored ge’men—discon¬ 
solate because they very soon found out 
they could not compete for favor against so 
astonishing a combination as Mile. d’Au- 
bigny’s beauty and Anton’s demonic violin. 
If Anton was in the mood—that is, if he 
was neither too far removed one side or the 
other from his last dose of cocaine—he could 
take complete possession of a roomful of 
noisy diners with three sweeps of his bow; 




44 The Girl Next Door 


he could hush them to silence and cast spell 
after spell upon them—thrill them, madden 
them with gayety, or make their throats 
tighten and their eyes prickle with swift¬ 
starting tears. 

And half the time, or more, no one in the 
room knew what he was playing; perhaps 
Anton did not know himself. He just 
played; and Mile, d’Aubigny supported him 
instinctively, tant bien que mal, with scat¬ 
tered, inconspicuous chords. At such times, 
when he had stopped playing at last, he al¬ 
ways for a moment glared about him at the 
enthralled faces of the diners under his spell, 
exclaimed “Tcha!” disgustedly, with a shrug 
of his whole frame dismissing such canaille, 
and then, as their enthusiasm broke upon 
him, turned his back on it and walked from 
the room. Nor would he, for all their en¬ 
thusiastic pleading, return. He had never 
been known to bow his thanks to the mixed 
patrons of Belcher’s joint. That is why. 


The Girl Next Door 


45 


being unable to fathom the depths of his 
wrathful scorn, they called him the crazy 
fiddler. 

Bud approved of the name and the rude¬ 
ness that led to it. He had quickly realized 
that the advertising value of Anton’s ec¬ 
centricities would bring many a merely curi¬ 
ous dollar into his till. So he never rebuked 
Anton for his rudeness; it was a funny sell¬ 
ing point—but, pragmatically, it was there. 
Bud was satisfied. 

One suspects from such details that An¬ 
ton Hrdlika might in earlier days have be¬ 
come a true virtuoso, might have won world 
plaudits instead of wild applause from the 
roisterers at Bud Belcher’s joint, if he had 
not from youth up been cursed by a vicious 
and vagabond heart. There was no stability 
in him; I fancy there never had been. He 
had the chaos of genius, only; not its divine 
order and poise. And by this time he was 
guttering out; his rare moments of fire were 


46 


The Girl Next Door 


the merest flare-ups from blackening cin¬ 
ders. To a critical ear, no doubt, his play¬ 
ing there, at Bud’s joint, would have seemed 
slovenly enough; a sort of incoherent raving 
of the strings only redeemed by flashes of 
true passion from being pitiful or absurd. 

Then, too, the singular presence of the 
man, and the presence beside him of Mile. 
d’Aubigny, with her petulant, child’s mouth 
and rebellious, half-furtive eyes, added a 
morbid piquancy to these exhibitions. An¬ 
ton Hrdlika looked to the full, in those days, 
the physical and spiritual wreck he was—a 
little, stooped man, emaciated and tremu¬ 
lous, with long spidery arms, and a great 
head ill balanced on a wisp of neck and 
haloed with a floating aura of reddish-blond 
hair. And his wax-white face had shrunken 
away to nothing, except for the eye-caverns 
with their deep-held, red-brown, malicious 
sparks. An unpleasant, macabre being, 
with an odd distinction about him, very dif- 


The Girl Next Door 


47 


ficult to account for. But everybody at 
Bud’s joint seems to have felt it, more or less 
strongly. Probably he impressed them by 
the sheer Alplike but unsupported cloud- 
forms of his egotism. 

But the flitting of Mile. d’Aubigny, with¬ 
out a word of explanation left behind, 
marked the beginning of the end for Anton. 
It brought on an immediate access of rage, 
followed by a state of progressive nerve 
exhaustion, which he sought to alleviate by 
more and more frequent doses of a drug it 
became more and more difficult for him to 
obtain. America was in mid-war frenzy, 
and the underground dealers of the drug 
traffic were being smoked out with relentless 
persistence by a government now fully alive 
to the patriotic advantages of sound young 
manhood. 

Finding now that his crazy fiddler had 
turned from an asset into a disagreeable 
liability Bud Belcher commanded Anton 


48 


The Girl Next Door 


and his boy to clear out. Wartime prohibi¬ 
tion was imminent anyway; few roadhouses 
were likely to survive that disaster. Bud 
was growing morose. His manners, his 
forms of speech, while dismissing Anton, 
were deplorable; so deplorable they defeated 
their own end. Anton’s reaction to them 
was a fit or seizure of some kind, probably 
hysterical, which left him too obviously 
down and out not to stir a faint sense of pity 
and responsibility even in Bud. 

At any rate, with Bela’s help he got An¬ 
ton into his bed and let him stay there for 
three weeks, while Bela nursed him and did 
odd jobs about the place to pay for his 
board. Then one morning Anton, half 
crazed with an ancient craving, made a 
supreme effort. He rose, dressed himself, 
managed to slip from the premises unseen, 
made his way somehow to Trenton, pawned 
there a valuable seal ring once given him 
by an early admirer, and at last—in some 


The Girl Next Door 


49 


devious manner, unexplained — purchased 
the crystals he desired. He returned to the 
roadhouse, raving, and died that night; and 
the following morning Bud Belcher turned 
his body over to the authorities, handed Bela 
a dollar, and told the boy to get the hell out-a 
here. 

Bela packed what little remained to him 
into an ancient carryall, tucked his father’s 
violin in its case under his left arm, and 
departed. 

It was a raw day of late April. It hap¬ 
pened to be his birthday. He was just 
eighteen. 

His more sensible course would have been 
to walk into Trenton and appeal to the au¬ 
thorities there for assistance. They were 
burying his father, and would no doubt have 
seen the necessity of providing some tem¬ 
porary care, or means of livelihood, for the 
son. Bela decided, however, to walk due 
east, toward Princeton. Princeton was a col- 


50 


The Girl Next Door 


lege town; therefore, he argued, a center of 
culture; Trenton, so far as he had examined 
it, was not. 

But it proved a long walk. Bela grew 
very hungry, very thirsty, very weary. His 
eyes attracted by the brilliant green of a 
broad field of winter wheat, he sat down on 
his ancient carryall by the side of the road, 
laying the violin case across his knees. 

His clothes were well worn—like the ex- 
pression; they were also much too small for 
him. He was all legs and arms. As he sat 
thus, not too happily or hopefully—though 
the pure vivid green of the wheat field, its 
color intensified by a lowering gray sky, 
was a conscious solace—many automobiles 
purred by. They invariably purred by. It 
was the nature of automobiles after all. He 
did. not blame them. 

“I must find Lally,” he thought. “Lally” 
was what he called his mother; his baby¬ 
hood name for her. 


The Girl Next Door 51 

It was a relief to be free of his father—at 
last; that was one good thing. 

But it was a pity to be saddled with his 
horrible violin—a violin he could never bring 
himself to sell—lest it harm someone. If 
he were to leave it there in the wheat field 
and run? No; there were things you 
couldn’t run from. But it was a great pity. 
It troubled him. 

Then he remembered the war, and that 
troubled him. He hated the very idea of 
war; but he wondered whether he ought not 
to enlist. “I shouldn’t mind being killed 
much,” he decided, “if it weren’t for Lally. 
I can’t enlist till I’ve found Lally. Perhaps 
I’m too young, anyway; I hope so.” So 
that was settled. 

And next he wondered how long one 
could go without eating — at a pinch. 
Wasn’t there a man, once, who had fasted 
forty days? Two or three wouldn’t hurt him 
then, surely, if it came to that. 



52 


The Girl Next Door 


But it grew obvious to him, gradually, 
that he must look.for a job. “I can’t hunt 
for Lally—not properly—until I’ve made 
some money. That’s the first step.” 

Well, after he had made some money and 
had found his mother—what then? 

Life was evidently before him. He might 
as well think it all out thoroughly, in ad¬ 
vance. 

3 \ 

The automobiles continued to purr by 
him, one after another, in both directions. 

That was life, then—knowing precisely 
where you wanted to go, and going there 
as quickly as possible. 

Where did he want to go? 

“Paris,” came the answer clearly. “I 
want to paint.” 

It didn’t occur to him that people were 
not just then going to Paris to paint. Or if 
it did, he realized that he had other things to 
do first, and by the time they were accom¬ 
plished the war might be over. 


The Girl Next Door 


53 


Other things to do first! Item: To make 
money. Item: To find his mother. Item: 
To find also his mother’s husband—the man 
who had driven her from his home, years 
ago. Bela, though he knew not so much of 
him as his name, hated that man. No 
wonder. Lally was just seventeen when she 
had married him. She was not eighteen 
when he had driven her from him. A little 
younger than he, Bela, was now! Item, 
then: To find that brute, that misbegotten 

dog! And having found him- 

Just at this critical point his reflections 
were broken in upon unexpectedly. ' An 
automobile slowed down as it neared him 
and came to a halt before him. A singular 
conveyance, indeed! Shaped in the body 
like a conch shell, a great canary-yellow 
conch shell. And on the largest volute 
of the conch shell was painted in staring 
black ornamental script a single mysterious 
word _ “NUXONE.” A chipper little 



54 The Girl Next Door 

man in a bearskin ulster was driving this 
car. 

“ ’Lo, kid!” he called to Bela. “Stranded? 
Want a lift?” 

Bela was glad of a lift. 

“Where you bound for?” asked the chip¬ 
per little man. 

“I don’t know,” answered Bela. 

“Don’t, eh? What’s loose? Are you out 
of luck?” 

Bela, in part, explained. 

“Fiddler, I see,” said the little man. 
“No,” replied Bela firmly; “I can’t play 
a note. This is my father’s violin—or was. 
He’s dead.” 

“Recent?” 

“Very.” 

“H’m,” said the chipper little man; “too 
bad. Well, that’s life, eh? It’s good while 
it lasts. How old are you?” 

“Just eighteen.” 

“Ha!” grinned the chipper little man, 


The Girl Next Door 55 

speeding her up to thirty-five. “You'll last 
a while yet anyway, won’t you?” 

“Unless I go to war,” said Bela. 

“Well, don’t you go till they take you! 
That’s my advice. If they want you they’ll 
take you fast enough. No use borrowin’ 
trouble in advance. So you want a job, 
hey?” Bela nodded. “Learned any trade?” 
Bela shook his head. “Good! How’d you 
like to come with us?” asked the chipper 
little man. “We’ll treat you fine. We’re a 
growing concern all right. I’ve dumped a 
lot of the stuff this run round.” 

“What stuff?” asked Bela. 

“Can’t you read!” cried the little man. 
“NUXONE!” 

“What kind of stuff is it?” queried Bela. 
“Oh — they drink it — folks drink it! 
They’d drink a lot more of it if I had my 
way! Why, I’d plaster every stand in this 
country with it! I’d use three sheets! I’d 
paint up Nuxone from N’Yawk to ’Frisco! 


56 The Girl Next Door 


No matter what it cost! You can’t dump 
stuff that ain’t advertised right. The Ameri¬ 
can people’s got no confidence in pikers!” 

“Does it taste good?” Bela queried. 

“Not so very. But it oughtn’t to! It 
tastes—peculiar. Once you’ve tried it you 
can’t forget it. That’s the great selling 
point. Get me?” 

“I’m not sure I do,” said Bela. 

“Then you’re no business man!” ex¬ 
claimed his companion, hitting it up to 
forty. “I’ll bet you’re some kind of a high¬ 
brow, hey? It’d suit you to teach school, 
hey? Too bad.” 

“Where are we going?” gasped Bela. 

“Oakdale Terrace, son—the garden city 
of the outer metrop! You may as well 
come along. How’s two per strike you? 
Rotten?” 

“I suppose that would be all right to start 
on,” said Bela doubtfully. “Of course, I’m 
sorry it isn’t more.” 



The Girl Next Door 57 

“Nacherly,” grunted the chipper little 
man. 

His name, Bela later discovered, was 
Jonas Trask. He’s the son-in-law of old 
Peter Schuchert, one of our three local 
magnates. And though chipper, as indi¬ 
cated, and not ungenial, he is—on the 
authority of the girl next door—“one wise 
little guy.” Local report has it, too, .that 
he is the only begetter of Nuxone, and if 
so, he is certainly an enthusiast for his brain 
child. But he is dependent upon Papa 
Schuchert for all capital expended in its 
commercial development, which not infre¬ 
quently puts a damper on his soaring ambi¬ 
tion. Papa Schuchert, you see, is said to 
look longer at a dollar before risking or 
spending it than any second man on the 
Terrace. That is possibly why Papa Schu¬ 
chert has more dollars to look at than most 
of us; it is also why it has become one of the 
duties of Jonas Trask to pick up down-and- 


58 


The Girl Next Door 


out labor wherever he may run upon it. 
And if you should desire to test the ex¬ 
treme limits of his chipper geniality you have 
only to pronounce in his presence two words 
—“Samuel Gompers.” An explosion both 
chaotic and profane always follows, and 
those firecracker expletives, “anarchist’’ and 
“Bolshevik,” can be heard popping through 
the clouds of wrath that enfold him. 

Bela spent his first week at Oakdale Ter- 

0 

race in a filthy rooming house for hunkies, 
hard by the public dump; and by the end of 
it he was of two minds. He could not de¬ 
cide which of two forms of suicide would 
prove the less disagreeable—jumping into 
the river or falling into the mixing vat. 
Jumping into the river—though, given the 
river, scarcely less nasty—was more poetic; 
but he could swim a little; so falling into 
the mixing vat would be more certainly 
effective. 

Fortunately Jim Hat, his foreman, asked 


The Girl Next Door 


59 


him on the morning of this crisis why the 
devil he was dying on his hands like that! 

“I wish I were dead,” sighed Bela. 

“Oh—you wisht you were dead!” mim¬ 
icked Jim. “What’s loose?” 

Bela explained that life in his present 
quarters, among the hunkies, was no longer 
desirable. 

“Do you good!” growled Jim Hat, him¬ 
self of hunkie origin. “You’re too goddam 
soft for this world!” 

But all the same he took Bela home with 
him that night and presented him to Mrs. 
Kingery, his neighbor. He happened to 
know that her attic room had just been 
vacated. 

Now Jim Hat was—and is—the appro¬ 
priate father of the girl next door. 


VIII 

T HE one night which Bela spent in the 
home of Jim Hat left an ineffaceable 
impression and sowed the seeds of 
future disaster. Miss Miniter—not given to 
gush in any form—says that Bela, with the 
doubtful exception of Donatello’s David, is 
the most romantically beautiful object she 
has ever seen. Judge, then, of the effect of 
this apparition upon the girl next door! 
Sadie Hat is herself but sixteen, though 
physically she might pass for twenty; and 
her rudimentary mind is shot through with 
just one primitive current of the highest pos¬ 
sible voltage. In all other respects she is 
an absolute nonconductor. She has a shrill- 
tongued mother, for whose tongue, however 

shrill, she cares nothing—being openly in- 

60 


The Girl Next Door 61 

subordinate. Does she not work in a button 
factory near Hackensack? Is she not self- 
supporting? Why, then, if she so desires, 
should she not be insupportable? Her 
mother and her five younger brothers and 
sisters find her so—and much good it does 
them! But, not without reason, there is one 
being whom she fears—Jim Hat, her father. 
Him she fears because she knows he is ca¬ 
pable of beating her. So to him alone she 
toadies; giving always the soft sly answer 

that turneth away-— 

Her wages, for the past year at least, 
have been far in excess of her deserts. She 
has blossomed out in immodest finery; and 
on hot summer evenings the ripe forms of 
her dumpy, precocious figure are displayed 
for whatever they may prove matrimonially 
—oh, she knows her way about, does the 
girl next door!—to be worth. Her hair is 
bobbed. She revels in rice powder and 
rouge. I have stepped on spiders with 



62 


The Girl Next Door 


more compunction than I would step on 
her if the gesture were feasible. 

Her factory being more distant, Sadie 
Hat arrives home each evening some twenty 
minutes later than Jim. She is always in 
the greatest possible hurry to get through 
dinner and array herself for the evening’s 
adventures. She doesn’t waste time by stop¬ 
ping to kiss her mother or play with the 
baby or go through any vain family rituals 
of affection. Samuel Butler himself did 
not regard family life with a more hostile 
absence of sentiment than does Sadie. All 
Sadie’s energy is reserved for the indispens¬ 
able preliminaries to founding a family of 
her own. Not that she wants a family; but 
she does want an adequate provider—and 
meanwhile she craves every thrill and dis¬ 
sipation incident to his pursuit. All life 
values for her are values of sensation; she 
doesn’t so much as guess that for other pos¬ 
sible persons other possible values exist. 


The Girl Next Door 


63 


But she is not a creature of pure, ungov¬ 
ernable passion; far from it. In her, crude 
physical instinct is directed by a low, crude 
cunning to crude material ends. And she is 
very typical; that is the pity and terror of 
it! If she were not typical I should not be 
afraid of her—as I am, unspeakably. I am 
obsessed by her! I see in her the boll weevil 
of democracy; the gangrene of social prog¬ 
ress; the hookworm of gentle manners; the 
tsetse fly of humane culture; the- 

But bear with me; I rave. 

She came home that night, then — the 
night Jim Hat brought Bela with him—in 
her usual haste to be through with dinner 
and on with the dance. War conditions 
had whipped up this metaphorical dance to 
a dervish madness. Military glamour had 
added the last possible thrill to be wrung 
from difference in sex. Not that the girl 
next door thought the less of Bert, her most 
hopeful gen’leman friend, because he had 



64 


The Girl Next Door 


flat feet and imperfect teeth and other 
slight defects debarring him from military 
glory. He’d be no use to her dead, she ap¬ 
prehended; and she could easily slip in as 
much martial excitement as she dared with 
other fellers in khaki—on the side. 

Such, doubtless, were her thoughts as she 
sped along Fuschia Street; but as she turned 
in to mount the porch steps of Jim Hat’s 
model building-loan cottage they must have 
vanished. There, seated in a rocking-chair 
on the front porch, was the handsomest 
young guy she had ever seen, with the swell- 
est eyes! His clothes were seedy and too 
small for him, but neat; and he wore them 
without self-consciousness. As Sadie ap¬ 
peared before him he rose quietly and 
bowed. These were not the manners to 
which Sadie was accustomed. They were so 
strange to her that she giggled, and said 
pertly, “Oh, don’t mention it! Say — 
where’d you blow in from?” 


The Girl Next Door 


65 


“Mr. Hat was kind enough to bring me 
home for the night,” said Bela. “I suppose 
you are his daughter, Sadie? My name is 
Hrdlika, Bela Hrdlika. I’m working under 
your father at the Nuxone plant.” 

“Lord help you!” responded Sadie, giv¬ 
ing him as she did so her most practiced and 
provocative ogle. “Ain’t dinner ready yet?” 

Bela says she struck him instantly as the 
most repulsive young woman imaginable; he 
says it was very difficult for him even to be 
polite to her. He sat beside her during the 
plentiful but rackety dinner more or less 
hurled before her husband and brood by 
poor, peevish Mrs. Hat; and this painted 
factory-flapper had the shamelessness to 
drop her fork—purposely, he thinks—be¬ 
tween them, and, when he leaned to recover 
it, to dive down beside him, pressing her 
shoulder hard against his; then, in accept¬ 
ing the fork from him, she pointedly 
squeezed his hand. 


66 


The Girl Next Door 


Bela was brick red when he came to the 
surface; not from embarrassment, he in¬ 
sists, but from pure rage. 

And when, after dinner, Sadie tried to 
complete her conquest on the front porch, 
while he was waiting for Jim to join him 
and conduct him across the side yard to Mrs. 
Kingery’s, Bela flatly and finally snubbed 
her. How he was able to accomplish this 
seeming impossibility Bela has never ex¬ 
plained; it is certain, however, that Sadie 
never forgave him. I fancy she promised 
herself then and there to get even with that 
stuck-up little guy some day; and I have 
reason to know that she kept her promise. 

But that was months after, at a time when 
Bela was hardly aware of her continued 
existence; when she had become for him 
merely something unpleasant in a dim way, 
something faintly offensive, over there 
across the side yard; something negligible 
and nameless—the girl next door. 


IX 


B ELA came to Mrs. Kingery’s in May, 
1918; I reached that blessed haven 
the following July; Miss Miniter had 
already been nesting there for upwards of a 
year. 

My arrival taking place the mid-after¬ 
noon of a weekday, I did not meet my 
fellow boarders until we assembled with 
Mr. and Mrs. Kingery and the two smaller 
Kingerys at dinner. Mrs. Kingery has the 
rare art of cooking a good round body-build¬ 
ing meal and serving it up hot, while partak¬ 
ing of it herself at appropriate intervals, 
correcting pleasantly, but ineffectively, the 
manners of her children, and joining in the 
general conversation — all with a seeming 

minimum of noise or confusion. Kingery 

67 


68 The Girl Next Door 


does not even suspect what a lucky, badly 
spoiled old walrus he is. 

On this evening of my first dinner, as it 
perhaps fortunately happened, Bela was 
five or ten minutes late in coming down. 
Mrs. Kingery explained the delay to her 
husband, who has the common masculine im¬ 
patience of any tardiness—not unavoidably 
his own—at mealtime. 

“It’s not the boy’s fault,” said Mrs. King¬ 
ery; “I asked him to do an errand for me 
on his way home. He’s putting on a clean 
shirt, Mr. Ell wood, in honor of the occa¬ 
sion.” 

“That lad’s too vain of his good looks!” 
growled Kingery, a massive, blue-chinned 
Celt; honest and grumblesome and entirely 
harmless. 

“And well he might be!” flashed Mrs. 
Kingery. “It would be a grand thing for 
Dennis there, if he had more nose to him 
and fewer freckles and warts.” 


The Girl Next Door 


69 


Dennis, a delightful grotesque, aged nine, 
affably wrinkled what nose he had; his grin 
is infectious. 

“Toads does it,” asserted Kathleen; re¬ 
ferring, I believe, to the warts. “He’s al¬ 
ways pickin’ up toads to scare me!” 

“Who’s this telling tales now?” asked 
Mrs. Kingery of no one in particular. But 
it was obvious that Kathleen was; so she 
pouted a heavy lower lip, thus emphasiz¬ 
ing a comic resemblance to her heavy 
father. 

“What’s the good of waitin’ for him any¬ 
way?” demanded Dennis; cheerfully, how¬ 
ever. Dennis, happily for him and the 
world, is his mother’s boy; there isn’t a 
peevish fiber in his tough little system. 

“The lad’s said a sensible thing for once!” 
This from Kingery. “Be seated all. Sit 
down. That’s your chair, Mr. Ellwood— 
beside Miss Miniter, so you’ll not be having 
Kathleen’s elbow in your ribs. Bring in the 


70 


The Girl Next Door 


soup, mother. I’ve a day’s work behind me, 
thank God.” 

Mrs. Kingery’s day’s work not being be¬ 
hind her yet by three hours, she retired to 
the kitchen; but Kingery’s final statement 
served the rest of us for a sort of informal, 
standing grace before meat, and—though 
accidental—one of the pithiest I had ever 
heard. 

Said Miss Miniter beside me pleasantly: 
“You’ll like Bela Hrdlika, Mr. Ellwood— 
when he does come. You’ll not be able to 
resist him. He’s a remarkable boy.” 

Speech failing me, I achieved a grotesque 
clucking sound, which Miss Miniter was 
kind enough to interpret as a question and 
to answer forthwith. 

“Hrdlika,” she smiled. “An odd name, 
isn’t it? Bohemian, I believe.” 

Well, it was soon evident that I had not 
betrayed myself; but it is fortunate that pre¬ 
cisely at this moment of personal crisis Mrs. 



The Girl Next Door 


71 


Kingery appeared from the kitchen with a 
tureen of oxtail soup, steaming and flam¬ 
boyantly fragrant. It created just the mo¬ 
mentary diversion I needed and enabled me 
to suppress all outer signs of my sudden and 
painful agitation. For my purpose in com¬ 
ing to Oakdale Terrace—my secret purpose, 
which was eventually to stamp me as a man 
of mystery—was to enter the home of Mrs. 
Kingery, meet there, and somehow win the 
affection of a boy of eighteen named Bela 
Hrdlika, who happened to be my son—my 
only child and apparent heir. 

He came down a moment later, entering 
with quiet, naturally graceful apologies to 
his hostess and host. Miss Miniter intro¬ 
duced me to him and I rose and shook hands 
with him across the table. The room being 
rather cramped for elaborate courtesies, this 
seemed the simplest thing to do. Or was it 
that I did not quite trust the joints of my 
knees? 



72 


The Girl Next Door 


“I’m very glad to meet you, Mr. Ell- 
wood.” Then he took his place between 
Dennis and Kathleen, with a comradely 
smile to teach. But his smiles, though 
friendly, were not light-hearted; his face, I 
convinced myself after a glance or two, was 
fundamentally sad. It was the first time I 
had ever seen him. 

And it was a warm night; too warm for 
a hot rich soup. I was troubled by a faint 
passing nausea, conscious of small cold 
beads of perspiration on my forehead. I 
hoped Miss Miniter would attribute them 
to the somewhat unseasonable heartiness of 
Mrs. Kingery’s table. I could talk little; 
but Bela Hrdlika talked less—his habit, as I 
was soon to discover. When dinner was 
over I excused myself at once, pretty awk¬ 
wardly, and retired to my room. 


X 


O NCE there, I lit my pipe, sat down 
by the window, open on the sticky 
breathlessness of the side yard, and 
let Remorse have her way with me. There 
were many things she was pleased for the 
hundredth time to recall to my attention, to 
insist upon in her relentless feminine man¬ 
ner. Many things. . . . 

In January of the year 1899 a young 
American—he was twenty-two—arrived in 
Paris, having come over directly from the 
port of New York. His name was Alfred 
Elliman. Yes, he is one and the same per¬ 
son as the now somewhat famous painter of 
very costly portraits and designer of mural 
decorations for the more ambitious capitals, 
courthouses, and public libraries of these 
happily extravagant States. Only child of a 

doctor in modest circumstances, he was born 

73 


74 


The Girl Next Door 


and grew up in the small but prosperous 
city of his ancestors. New Haven, Connecti¬ 
cut. However, at the time I write of, both 
his father and mother were dead. His 
father, long a widower, had died just after 
Alfred’s graduation from Yale, June, 1898; 
and Alfred found himself in possession— 
once the estate was cleared—of ten or twelve 
thousand dollars. It was enough, more than 
enough, for his instant needs; he felt enor¬ 
mously, fantastically wealthy; and he really 
was a very fortunate and undeserving young 
man. He had always been headstrong and 
thoughtless, and not a little wild; his father 
had consistently spoiled him from the time 
of his mother’s death, which occurred in a 
railroad accident when Alfred was ten. He 
had been with his mother on that fatal jour¬ 
ney, escaping unharmed; and his father 
could never thereafter bear to see him even 
momentarily unhappy. If Alfred had not 
been genuinely fond of his father, the re- 



The Girl Next Door 


75 


suits of this singular indulgence must have 
proved even more disastrous than they were. 

They were disastrous enough. During 
his four years at Yale the boy spent rather 
more than his father was earning; and while 
doing so, thought he was having the time of 
his life. Perhaps, for an unawakened cub, 
he was. I look back on him wonderingly, 
as a vital youngster with champagne spirits 
and tastes, and no sense of responsibility; 
a ground-pawing, capersome, selfish young 
zebra! Let the mixed images of cub, un¬ 
awakened, and capersome zebra with cham¬ 
pagne tastes, express him for what they are 
worth; they are worth quite as much as he 
was, however mixed. 

But he had his aptitudes. He could drink 
more than most boys of his age and feel it 
less, and he never found much trouble in 
bluffing along through his classes and then 
feverishly boning up as the terms closed, 
just in time to pass, but no more than pass, 


76 


The Girl Next Door 


his exams. And he had, too, a talent that 
added luster to his undergraduate career. 
He could draw better than any man then in 
Yale; his caricatures in the Record were 
famous. So he made desirable societies and 
was generally considered one of the more 
popular men in his class. Not the most 
popular, for he had an insolent, satirical 
tongue at times, and by Junior year had be¬ 
come something very much like a snob. The 
plain fact is that he was suffering those days 
from acute juvenile megalomania in its most 
critical form. 

Observe him, then, foot-free in Paris, with 
the great world his oyster! He had gone 
there, of course, to study painting; or, 
rather, to paint. He was not just then of 
the opinion that overmuch study would, for 
him, prove necessary. His facility with a 
pencil, and the gush of his college contem¬ 
poraries, had led him to pooh-pooh the dull, 
senile dictum that art is long. Nor was he 


The Girl Next Door 


77 


convinced, either, that life is short. Meas¬ 
ureless time seemed then to stretch before 
him, filled with the most shining and piquant 
possibilities. 

He secured, to start with, an unusual 
apartment, unusually expensive, at least, for 
pre-war Paris, with a vast balconied studio 
for its principal room; and the whole apart¬ 
ment was stuffed with beautiful, more or less 
authentic cinquecento furniture and other 
rare and comfortless early Italian objets 
d’art . It belonged to a negligible English 
painter with a rich, restless wife whom he 
dared not neglect, and who had just decided 
to winter on the Riviera and spend the fol¬ 
lowing summer at Deauville. The English 
painter preferred Paris to the Riviera and 
almost any place to Deauville, but that was 
neither here nor there. He must go; and his 
apartment was just the sort of thing Alfred 
had supposed would offer itself. He trusted 
his luck. 


78 


The Girl Next Door 


This apartment was situated four flights 
up in an ancient building on the He St.- 
Louis, that dignified, peaceful, slowly de¬ 
caying provincial town, set down by mistake 
in mid-welter of Paris and somehow lost 
there; a tranquil haven for the discerning. 
From his western windows Alfred now com¬ 
manded one of the breath-taking views of 
Europe; looked out across the dividing 
Seine to that marvel of marvels, Notre 
Dame, not masked by its too dumpy fa£ade, 
but seen in its whole majestic yet soaring 
sweep, as it should be, from the rear. So 
long then as his money lasted he might well 
be thought to be in heaven; he had, tempo¬ 
rarily, not an inconvenience or care in the 
world. 

Auguste and his wife, Jeanne - Marie, 
went apparently with the apartment, at in¬ 
creased wages, kept it in apple-pie order, 
and served their new charge the most varied 
and delectable meals. They also polished 


The Girl Next Door 


79 


his shoes, kept his clothes pressed, and did his 
mending. But unquestionably they believed 
him to be a millionaire and arranged their 
little percentages on this and that accord¬ 
ingly. Did not the American gentleman 
pay all accounts presented without inquiry 
or demur? Surely, then, le bon Dieu must 
have sent him to provide more largely for 
their declining years. It was the merest 
moral prudence, if this were true, to take 
certain slight advantages. 

Yet by the end of the first month in this 
perfect retreat Alfred began to feel lonely, 
shut off from life. He had entered no one 
of the famous ateliers of Paris, having de¬ 
cided to work out his own artistic salvation. 
He had secured models, and he thought he 
was working very hard if he stuck at his 
painting two or three hours a day. To his 
professional models, many of whom are ex¬ 
cellent judges of painting, it was evident 
that the young American amateur—for so 


80 


The Girl Next Door 


they described him—had a certain talent, 
with which they never supposed he meant to 
do more than amuse himself. They took 
him seriously as a source of profit; not other¬ 
wise. 

Alfred, on the other hand, believed that 
he took himself quite seriously; believed he 
was truly ambitious for a great career. Had 
he not thus far, for example, led a most re¬ 
strained life—he, a young bachelor in Paris, 
without home ties, with money in his purse, 
and with a genuine taste for irresponsible 
society? What an amusing fling he might 
make of it all, if—if he were not determined 
to create a name for himself. He would be¬ 
gin a real canvas soon, something he might 
offer for exhibition; something on an im¬ 
pressive scale. He didn’t quite know what. 
However, an idea would be certain to strike 
him, sooner or later. 

Meanwhile, there was no denying it, he 
was growing bored. He had come to Paris 


The Girl Next Door 81 

without introductions and had made no 
friends there, had not even thrown himself 
in the way of making them, whether desir¬ 
able or undesirable. Perhaps after all he 
might better enroll himself as the pupil 
of some famous maitre . A little criticism 
couldn’t hurt him, he supposed; and there 
would be other fellows there. In short, it 
might prove more amusing. 

He mentioned the matter one morning to 
his model; an elderly picturesque type with 
a flowing white beard; and it rather nettled 
him to discover that this elderly cynic seemed 
to think this young sir might find work in 
the ateliers too steady and monotonous for 
him. This young sir was not dependent 
upon his brush, assuredly—that leaped to 
the eyes. Why, then should he discommode 
himself? A sketch or so now and then— 
good! “Pour passer le temps ' 9 But—art, 
m’sieu— Vart! “Ah, comme c'est long ! 39 He 
wondered, too, that m’sieu, with his charm- 




82 


The Girl Next Door 


ing personality, lived always alone. He ven¬ 
tured to remind m’sieu that youth does not 
last for ever. Art, after all, was a metier! 
“But love, m’sieu— ah, grace a Dieu !—quite 
on the contrary. A graceful and amiable 
mistress, for example, in an apartment so 
elegant, so-” 

Alfred checked him, pretty sharply. He 
had a healthy American dislike for this par¬ 
ticular form of suggestion. Yet the sug¬ 
gestion lingered. 

Its first effect was to push Alfred toward 
entering himself at once as a pupil at the 

atelier of-Well, that was the difficulty; 

he could not quite make up his mind which 
of several possible masters to serve. He 
would much prefer to become the single, ad¬ 
mired disciple of some great painter, some 
Olympian being, far too splendid and re¬ 
nowned ever to have wasted his precious 
personality in teaching groundlings. Such 
a being, for example, as Renoir — or the 




The Girl Next Door 


83 


mighty and truculent Degas! Unfortu¬ 
nately he hadn’t the least idea how to come 
at them; so he thought best to reflect on it 
a little longer. Doubtless his best introduc¬ 
tion to such a being would be a completed 
canvas—a really distinguished piece of work 
for so young a man. Yes, that was it; and 
his master’s recognition would open other 
doors for him—give him the freedom of all 
that was most brilliant in the artistic life 
of Paris. A completed canvas—something 
striking; perhaps a little daring—was the 
first step! He would set to work on it im¬ 
mediately, just so soon at least as a genuine 
inspiration flashed upon him. 

It flashed upon him, this inspiration, a 
week later—in the most concrete and ab¬ 
sorbing form. He was padding about his 
studio at the time, much like a wolf in a 
cage; searching every corner of it for an 
outlet to a more adventurous world — for 
an outlet that, like a felt-for word at the 



84 


The Girl Next Door 


tongue’s tip, just tantalizingly wasn’t there. 
Then Auguste slipped in to him, with apol¬ 
ogies, and announced that a Mme. Meran 
was applying for work on behalf of her 
daughter, Laurestine. That ancient type— 
yes, perfectly! he had lately posed for m’sieu 
—he had also taken the liberty, it appears, 
of mentioning m’sieu to this excellent Mme. 

Meran.“Ah, but yes, m’sieu; she 

seems a most respectable person. And her 
daughter—charming! Altogether pretty—» 
and altogether young! M’sieu, then, de- 

• 99 

sires- 

To his dying hour, I am certain, Alfred 
Elliman will never quite be able to forget 
the thrill of his first meeting with Laures¬ 
tine Meran. She came wistfully into the 
vast picture-book studio, clinging, almost, 
to her mother’s skirts, and looking the child 
in years that she still, almost, was. Mme. 
Meran, herself a personable though slightly 
battered woman, had dressed her daughter 




85 


.The Girl Next Door 

simply, but with artful quaintness; a nymph 
in classic yet oddly coquettish white, with a 
small, absurdly demure poke bonnet, Lau- 
restine might well have stepped from an 
old print of the Directoire. She had her 
mother’s black, soft, luster less hair and 
night-blue eyes; but the faint, unsullied tea- 
rose bloom of her was wholly her own. 

“A slip of a girl”—the old saying some¬ 
how perfectly expressed her. Those night- 
blue eyes lifted with a timid candor, with an 
effect, almost, of pathos. Their emotional 
appeal came with the double force of 
checked tears or a sigh repressed. Each 
timid-eager glance was a petition on behalf 
of lonely innocence astray in a too-cynical 
world. Not to answer this petition in¬ 
stantly, by any means within his power, 
would have seemed to Alfred a crime 
against all that is best and loveliest in 
Nature. 

And that gave him his inspiration: In- 


86 The Girl Next Door 

nocence, just as she stood before him, in just 
such a studio; Cynicism, in the form of a 
roue of the boulevards, stepping forward; 
Sir Galahad de nos jours, in a form that 
must be disguised a little, lest it prove a self 
portrait, barring him from her with a tall 
young back suddenly presented; while the 
eyes of Innocence thank him and his own 
answer, “Courage! Trust in me! I love 
you!” These figures to be realistically pre¬ 
sented, yet with a broad touch of cosmic 
symbolism. . . . 

Obvious and fatuous romanticism of a 
young man? Perhaps. But, after all, mas¬ 
terpieces have been created from even sillier 
material; given passionate sincerity, the 
quality of the thing felt matters in art so 
little; and then, too, masterpieces are so 
largely a question of perfected technique. 
It was this stubborn little question of tech¬ 
nique, not poverty of material or insincerity 
of feeling, that was to keep Alfred Elliman, 


The Girl Next Door 87 


and for many a year yet, precisely where he 
belonged—with the rank and file. 

Mme. Meran proved not to be a French¬ 
woman at all; she was Irish—daughter, she 
said, of a self-exiled Irish patriot, and 
widow of a comedian formerly attached to 
the Odeon; a celebrated man, she assured 
Alfred, but—alas!—improvident. He had 
left her penniless, with a child of seven to 
nurture and educate. She had done her 
poor best. M’sieu could see for himself that 
her child had not suffered. As for her child’s 
mother—ah! 

But Laurestine was not ungrateful, she 
thanked God; and she posed only—“always 
accompanied by me; that goes without say¬ 
ing”—for painters and sculptors of the high¬ 
est distinction and respectability. “You, 
Mr. Elliman, are a little younger than I was 
given to understand. Otherwise, I should 
not have ventured to come. I find it impos¬ 
sible to be too circumspect.” 


88 


The Girl Next Door 


However, an arrangement for daily sit¬ 
tings—at an honorarium, per hour, hitherto 
unheard of in Paris—was soon concluded. 

“But my daughter does not sit for the 
whole figure, Mr. Elliman; that I must tell 
you. Except to M.-, the master sculp¬ 

tor, it is true. But so old, so famous a man! 
He has been like a second father to Laures¬ 
tine.” 

Alfred felt himself blushing hotly, and 
could have wept for it. He hastened to 
assure Mme. Meran that he had a fancy to 
paint Laurestine just as she was, in the very 
costume she was wearing. 

“That is a delicate compliment to me, 
m’sieu,” said Mme. Meran, beaming upon 
him. 

Laurestine too—all but—beamed; and 
Alfred later believed he had heard her mur¬ 
mur, “M’sieu Elliman nous flatte, n’est-ce - 
pas, mamanV* If so, these were the only 
words that Laurestine uttered throughout 



89 


The Girl Next Door 

the interview; but as she retired with her 
mother she vouchsafed him one final, pathet¬ 
ically appealing lift from her night-blue 
eyes. 

But though Remorse spared me nothing, 
I shall spare you much—all but a bare rec¬ 
ord of the too hasty rise and fall of Alfred 
Elliman’s farcical and tragic romance. 

Keyed to what he believed must be con¬ 
cert pitch by the daily presence of Laures- 
tine, whose mother more and more fre¬ 
quently withdrew on a plea of errands or 
other business, Alfred slaved for two months 
on the picture that was to have made his 
reputation; only to offer it for the spring 
Salon and have it rejected — as it should 
have been, since it was a tissue of incompe¬ 
tencies. But, he comforted himself, is genius 
not always at first rejected by the official, 
the academic? Moreover, the world was no 
longer with him; he was spellbound in a 
private, ecstatic dream. 



90 Xhe Girl Next Door 

And inevitably, given the time, the place, 
the girl, and the mother, he married the wist¬ 
ful, enchanting Laurestine and floated off 
with her in a pearly cloud for a grand tour 
of heaven, via Lake Como, Venice, the 
Dolomites, and way stations. His love for 
her was complete physical infatuation. Her 
whim was his law; he could deny her noth¬ 
ing—and she, poor child, innocent at least 
in this, supposed she had become the bride 
of a sort of deified combination of Aladdin, 
the Barons Rothschild, and the Grand 
Mogul. Literally, though unwittingly, she 
ruined her besotted boy husband in two 
months of whirling, rapturous extrava¬ 
gance, and he, lost in the fantastic dream 
life of his passion, heard vaguely the roar 
of the cataract before them but made no 
effort to turn their racing boat shoreward. 
No effort, at least, until the smooth brink 
arched under their prow- 

From Vienna he had to telegraph Mme. 



The Girl Next Door 


91 


Meran, his astonished mother-in-law, for 
money enough to return with Laurestine 
to Paris. Mme. Meran was not unduly 
disturbed, however. Doubtless this dear 
Alfred’s income—of American origin, nat¬ 
urally—had somehow been delayed. Smil¬ 
ingly she borrowed the necessary sum from 

M. -, the master sculptor and second 

father to Laurestine. “For a few days only, 
mon cheri! It is nothing. That dear Al¬ 
fred, thou knowest, is a gold mine.” 

“Thou art certain, Toto? Thou hast made 
inquiries—of his banker, for example?” 

“But no, Aristide. Was he not willing to 
marry Laurestine without dowry? He can¬ 
not be an adventurer! I tell thee what I 
have seen and know. He is Peru itself, that 
boy—absolutely! And of a naivete!” 

“Ah, good, good! But one sees thou art 
not a Frenchwoman, Toto — not at heart. 
She would have inquired of his banker, and 
well in advance.” 




92 


The Girl Next Door 


That very evening Alfred Elliman was 
pointing out to Mrs. Alfred Elliman, her¬ 
self helplessly aware that something un¬ 
comfortable must have happened, that, 
though still living, they were now below the 
falls and cast forth bruised, bleeding, and 
naked on the rocks. 

The shamefaced return to Paris brought 
on immediately a succession of terrible and 
degrading scenes. Alfred made full confes¬ 
sion of his incredible folly, but protested 
that he had throughout been innocent of any 
thought of deception. This Mme. Meran, 
filled now with a cold fury, refused to be¬ 
lieve. By his way of life he had represented 
himself to be a man of great wealth, able to 
maintain her daughter — and herself, bien 
entendu — in a certain position. He had 
trapped Laurestine by a deliberately acted 
lie. What now did he propose to do about 
it? 

He proposed, Alfred said, to do every- 


The Girl Next Door 93 

thing in his power to support his wife and 
regain for her in time the position her 
mother believed to have been promised her; 
the position he himself wanted for her. He 
had been a fool, perhaps almost criminally 
a fool; but he loved Laurestine and was 
eager to do his utmost to prove it. He be¬ 
lieved in himself, in spite of everything. If 
Laurestine would stand by him, help him? 
She had drawn a little off from them; was 
taking, as usual, no part in the conversation. 
It wounded him. But, after all—he strug¬ 
gled on with his appeal, made now, really, 
to Laurestine—they were young; in good 
health. A year or so of poverty would not 
hurt them, he guessed; might even prove the 
happiest years of their lives—? Laurestine 
did not respond. Of course, the first step 
was to retrench, give up the apartment, take 
a single room somewhere on the left bank, 
sell anything they possessed of value for 
their immediate needs. Laurestine did not 
respond. 



94 The Girl Next Door 

“But have you no relatives in America*.” 
demanded Mme. Meran, “who could be 
counted on?” 

Yes; he had one, an aunt with a small 
independence. She could and would, he 
knew, help him in a small way, if it be¬ 
came absolutely necessary. He hoped it 
would not be necessary. If Laurestine 
would stand by him, do her part, he had 
no fears for the future; he would work day 
and night. 

“At what, may I ask?” Mme. Meran’s 
voice was not pleasant at this crisis; every 
tone of it was a studied insult. 

“My painting.” 

“Painting! Let me tell you this, once for 
all: you have no talent. If you paint for 
a thousand years, you’ll produce nothing 
but—abortions!” 

“That is your opinion, madame; not mine. 
Is it yours, Laurestine?” 

She was sitting huddled, my wife, on a 


The Girl Next Door 


95 


carved and gilded Renaissance dower chest; 
her face was petulant, feebly rebellious. 
Nor did she answer me. So I repeated my 
question, insisting upon it: “Is it yours, 
Laurestine?” 

Her reply, in her languid child’s drawl, 
went wide of the mark. “Maman said you 
would make me happy. Otherwise I don’t 
wish to be married. If you can’t be nice to 
me-” 

“Someone else can?” I cried. “Is that it? 
Are you that kind, after all? You and your 
mother? Yes; I see you are! Once my 
money’s gone you’ve no use for me, eh? 
Well, clear out then, both of you! It strikes 
me all three of us are getting just about 
what we deserve!” 

I was quite crazy, I think, in those mo¬ 
ments; wholly beside myself with the pain 
of disillusionment, with grief and rage. If 

Laurestine had stood by me-But if she 

was that kind—to hell with her! To hell 





96 The Girl Next Door 

with love and life! To hell with everything 
in this rotten, disappointing world! 

A characteristic reaction at twenty-two— 
when twenty-two has been almost wholly to 
blame for his own misfortunes. 

And I see I have slipped again, uncon¬ 
sciously, into the first person—so vividly did 
those moments return! It is quite as well. 
For sometimes I look back on that cub, 
Alfred Elliman at twenty - two, as on a 
stranger; at other times I am one with him, 
feeling his mistakes and follies at work in 
me, relentlessly shaping my existence even 
to-day. Karma. I am what he yet makes 
me—cub that he was! I bear no resent¬ 
ment. But if only he had cut and trimmed 
from a somewhat finer pattern! 



XI 


M ANY, many years later I, Alfred 
Elliman, a prosperous, rather lone¬ 
ly, rather tired, rather depressed, 
perhaps rather depressing, bachelor of forty 
—was hard at work in my New York studio 
at the tiptop of the Quat’z Arts Building on 
West Fifty-ninth Street; or, as my fellow 
lessees prefer to call it, Central Park South. 
When I say “bachelor” I borrow a descrip¬ 
tive term not infrequently used to define my 
status; omitting, however, the adjectives 
commonly coupled with it. It was a pre¬ 
maturely warm day for middle April and to 
combat the suffocating, un-turn-offable heat 
from steam riser-pipes, I had thrown open 
the lower panels of my great studio window. 
The grass in the Park, I had noted indif¬ 
ferently, was turning green, and a weeping 

97 




98 The Girl Next Door 

willow by the little swan-boat pond was a 
cascade of gold. Spring was coming on, 
then, and really it did not matter; not to me 
personally, at least, nor much, I supposed, 
to a heartsick, war-ridden world. 

I was engaged that day, by official re¬ 
quest, in designing a poster for the Third 
Liberty Loan. It was not wholly a con¬ 
genial task. War seemed to me quite the 
stupidest of human enterprises, though just 
the sort of thing to be expected from the 
human race, taken by and large. I was not 
a pacifist. In a world filled with aggressive 
and self-seeking men and tribes of men I 
was by no means persuaded of the wisdom 
of turning the other cheek. Life, as I 
viewed it, was a long and necessarily ruth¬ 
less scrimmage between forces making, 
however blindly, for civilization and forces 
making, however blindly, for barbarism; and 
one couldn’t decently withdraw because the 
choice of weapons was not granted one by a 


The Girl Next Door 


99 


disinterested cosmos or a coarse-grained foe. 
Given planetary conditions, I held, the main 
thing was to lay about one lustily; if possible 
—that is, supposing one could discern it— 
on the side of the angels. 

And ever since 1914 I had believed that 
to be, on the whole,—say, as four to three, 
the slight preponderance Samuel Butler 
grants to God over the devil—the side of 
the Allies. Being in Paris at the time, I 
had offered myself at once, then, in August, 
1914, for any service that France could find 
for me; and my health being excellent for 
my age, France had graciously enrolled me 
in her Foreign Legion. With that legion I 
served until February, 1917; at which time, 
having escaped all the more dramatic perils 
of war, I fell inglorious victim to trench feet 
and inflammatory rheumatism, the latter dis¬ 
ease leaving its mark upon me in the form 
of a leaky mitral valve, later compensated 
?—if I haven’t mixed up the terms—by an 


100 The Girl Next Door 


enlarged right ventricle; in short, I was hon¬ 
orably discharged from the service with the 
inevitable Croix de Guerre and told to take 
little exercise, less tobacco, and no alcohol 
whatever for the dubious remnant of my 
life. 

So I went home to America; partly to 
recuperate, and partly to discover why the 
devil my fellow countrymen thought them¬ 
selves “au dessns de la melee ”—“too proud 
to fight.’’ Amd, to my joy, on arriving 
there, the first thing I discovered was that 
most of my fellow countrymen thought 
nothing of the kind. 

Nevertheless, I was a disgruntled man. 
My months of service and invalidism had 
completely unsettled me. While civiliza¬ 
tion, such as it was, was doing its best to 
commit suicide, art in any form seemed to 
me peculiarly de trop ; I had no desire what¬ 
ever to paint. But I did paint, in spite of 
myself; commissions besieged me now that 


The Girl Next Door 101 


I cared little about them, and there were 
one or two patriotic jobs which I hadn’t the 
impudence to turn down. 

They didn’t solace me, however! How 
could they? America was fighting hard, at 
last! And there was nothing—no ties, no 
family responsibilities—to keep me at the 
rear. Nothing but my infernal slacker of a 
heart! Doctors still heard all manner of, 
to them, interesting murmurs when they 
pressed the little black bell of their stetho¬ 
scopes between my ribs; they were still ex- 
asperatingly insistent as to alcohol, tobacco, 
and exercise. I longed to throw myself into 
this conflict body and soul—and I was asked 
to design war posters! No wonder the com¬ 
ing on of spring didn’t seem greatly to mat¬ 
ter. At a crisis when vigorous men were 
needed I found myself rather less than one- 
half a man. 

The doorbell sounded. I was in no mood 
to see anybody that morning and told Li 


102 The Girl Next Door 


Po, the Chinese Nightingale, to bar the 
outer gates. His name isn’t Li Po, but I 
call him that because he has the suscepti¬ 
bility of a poet, and because of his occa¬ 
sional overindulgence in rice wine. He had 
attached himself to me in 1907, when I was 
visiting the grave of Confucius, near the 
city of K’iuh-fow, and had taken complete 
charge of me ever since, combining in one 
imperturbable spirit all the virtues of per¬ 
fect cook, faultless valet, tender nurse, and 
charming guide, philosopher and friend. As 
a young ne’er-do-well in China he became a 
Christian convert in order to live softly and 
learn English, and having done so he con¬ 
tinued to live softly while lapsing quietly 
back into “the religion of all sensible men.” 
I haven’t the least idea why he for so long 
considered it his sufficient life work to cod¬ 
dle me. 

He returned in this instance, however, in 
spite of my instructions, and presented me 


The Girl Next Door 103 


with a half sheet of paper on which was 
scribbled in pencil a single name—Laures- 
tine. It was the last name I should have 
expected to find there. 


XII 


W HAT surprised me most when Lau- 
restine came in to me was her still 
wistful, childlike beauty. She was 
wearing a ready-made suit, evidently new, 
and cut in the extreme department-store ver¬ 
sion of the prevailing mode—the skirt very 
short and narrow, emphasizing somewhat the 
ingenue look of her. A smart little straw 
trimmed with dark blue poppies, a flower 
unknown to science, matched and accented 
the depth of her night-blue eyes. My first 
startled impression was that the very slip of 
a girl who had once entered my studio in 
Paris to bring me disaster, again stood be¬ 
fore me, untouched by Time; an innocent 
Lamia exempt from mortality. Then she 
passed from shadow into the full north glare 

from the studio window and I saw that she 

104 


The Girl Next Door 105 

was not, after all, immortally seventeen; I 
saw that a discreetly cunning use of make¬ 
up had something to do with the astonishing 
illusion. Something; by no means all. Even 
in that full cool glare it would have been im¬ 
possible, I think, for a stranger to believe 
her a day more than thirty, and he might 
easily have supposed her twenty-five. I in¬ 
sist upon this, for I believe this extraordi¬ 
nary impression of youth given by a woman 
of thirty-five, who had lived, as I later dis¬ 
covered, through experiences bitter enough 
to have prematurely aged her, was due 
chiefly to a psychical defect. Laurestine, I 
am now convinced, was born incapable of 
mental or, if you prefer, spiritual maturity. 
Experience, which channels most of us so 
deeply, could model her nature only, if I 
may put it so, in low relief; she was not, 
could not be, emotionally or morally, a crea¬ 
ture of sharp high lights and inky shadows; 
or, to change the figure she was like a violin 


106 The Girl Next Door 


with constantly muted strings, and however 
wildly or sadly that virtuoso. Time, might 
play upon her, the full vibrations of her 
being were checked and the resultant music 
was a little thin, a little dull. 

Thus she passed through life affecting 
others for good or evil more deeply than she 
was ever herself affected. And her appeal 
to life was throughout but the stray kitten’s 
appeal for shelter, for a stroking hand, for 
a saucer of milk and a warm corner on the 
hearthrug. Asking so little, really, it is 
singular that she should have been so kicked 
and buffeted about the world; a discipline 
that had taught her little, I found, but a 
self-pitying vindictiveness and the instinc¬ 
tive swift use, when cornered, of teeth and 
claws. 

It was her old stray kitten’s appeal that 
she brought now, without embarrassment, to 
me. 


“How old you look, Alfred.” 


The Girl Next Door 107 

“So old as that?” 

“Older. But IVe been reading about you 
lately—in the papers. You’re up in the 
world again. You said you would be. Ma- 
man was always wrong, somehow—wasn’t 
she? I’ve had the devil of a life—almost 
ever since you kicked me out.” 

“Oh! Hardly that! Play fair, Laures- 
tine. You were only too glad to leave me.” 

“Well —maman said-And I couldn’t 

know then, could I, you’d get back to all 
this? That’s the worst of it. I’ve guessed 
wrong all through—like maman . I thought 
Anton would have the world at his feet.” 

“Anton?” 

“I stuck to him sixteen years, like a fool. 
That’s something. Not many women would 
have. Ah, voila Venfer meme! Comme 
j’etais bete, au fond! Dragging on with him 
like that, Alfred; going lower and lower!” 

“Anton?” I repeated. 

“Anton Hrdlika. You wouldn’t know 




108 The Girl Next Door 

him. He came back to Paris from Vienna 
just after you disappeared. Where did you 
go, Alfred?” 

I told her briefly. 

“Well,” she then said, in her casual, semi¬ 
detached way, “does it interest you at all, 
Alfred, after all these years, to know that 
you’re the father of a grown-up son?” 

Yes, it interested me. . . . 

But, first, some words of explanation 
here; I had hoped to avoid them, but I see 
now they have become inevitable. 

For eighteen months after my debacle at 
twenty-two, after Laurestine had left me, 
and the apartment on the He St.-Louis had 
been given up, together with the value at 
forced sale of all my personal effects save 
the clothes on my back and a change or two 
of linen, I had plowed on stubbornly, alone, 
through the hungriest and blackest hours of 
my life. To what depths I was then reduced 


The Girl Next Door 109? 

it doesn’t amuse me even now to recall. 
Twenty times I was on the point of giving 
up the struggle, writing to my aunt for 
money enough to feed me, put a decent suit 
on my back and fetch me home; down and 
out, broken-spirited—licked. But always at 
the last moment some gust of pride re¬ 
strained me; and if I wrote her it was only 
to say that I was working hard and, I hoped, 
making some progress as a painter. Which 
was true enough in its way—a way of peni¬ 
tential wretchedness I simply haven’t the 
heart fully to describe. 

Naturally, under these circumstances, I 
was soon withdrawn from any probable 
chance of contact with Mme. Meran or Lau- 
restine; though I suspected it would not be 
difficult to find them, had I desired to do so, 
by making inquiries at the suburban estate 
of Laurestine’s famous second father, which 
I knew to be charmingly situated in Auteuil. 
But I had more pressing cares. By the end 


110 The Girl Next Door 

of six months I was kenneled at night in a 
stinking slum, an inner court off the Rue de 
la Montagne Ste.-Genevieve, a street I now 
always avoid when in Paris, for all its me¬ 
dieval picturesqueness. There are certain 
smells there, smells as ancient as the stones 
which seem veritably to sweat them forth, 
that revive too sharply the humiliations of 
certain moments. However, perhaps I 
ought not to look back so bitterly on an 
environment which in itself led directly to a 
turn for the better in my fortunes. 

When more than a year had passed since 
my downfall I was approaching the absolute 
zero of endurable existence. My straits— 
they were not imaginary—were of course 
largely due to my fantastic determination to 
make my living as a painter, and in no other 
way. My one source of income—ridiculous 
phrase in this connection!—was the sale for 
little or nothing of copies, done on small 
panels of wood, of the more popular modern 


The Girl Next Door HI 


paintings in the Luxembourg. A third-rate 
dealer in picture postcards and other tourist 
gimcracks, situated on a side street near the 
Pantheon, would now and then buy these 
things from me at a franc or so the panel; 
but neither he nor anyone else in the Quarter 
would do more than shrug shoulders over my 
attempts to sell original work. 

And it became increasingly difficult for 
me to buy even a minimum of the materials 
I needed; in fact the day came at last when 
I found myself with nothing but some left¬ 
over ends of crayon and the roll of coarse 
paper I had persuaded a horse-butcher to 
give me in return for lettering a half dozen 
window cards. That, I think, was my abso¬ 
lute zero; and it was with an almost hyster¬ 
ical desperation, with raging disgust of life 
in my heart, that I divided the roll of coarse 
paper into six sheets, seized a bit of crayon, 
and within an hour’s time dashed off—there 
are no truer words for it—a series of harsh. 


112 The Girl Next Door 


brutal sketches, impressions of the street life 
down there in the foul court, seven stories 
of poverty and crime below my attic win¬ 
dow: Toinette, the half-witted crone, finger¬ 
ing over garbage for her 3 tites trouvailles; 
Gaspard, with his pendulous goiter; and so 
on- 

Oh, I had no need to draw these derelicts 
from the life! Their images, with all they 
implied of human degradation, rose before 
me, menacing types of impotence and de¬ 
spair. I flung them on to the coarse sheets 
with broad, abrupt strokes like curses; I 
labeled them: “Toinette, Cour des Gueux 33 ; 
“Gaspard, Cour des Gueux 33 . . . And 
then I rolled them up carelessly, those six 
sketches, thrust them under my arm, and 
went forth to sell them, somehow, anyhow— 
I knew not how—but if necessary I would 
hawk them along the quays like the beggarly 
failure I had become. 

And it was, indeed, along the Quai des 



The Girl Next Door 113 


Grands Augustins that I met Conrad Ar¬ 
cher. There has been no stronger force in 
the art world of England during the first 
decades of the twentieth century; his mas¬ 
tery of both line and color—though I admit 
I love the man himself too deeply for calm 
judgment—seems to me absolute. He is 
ten years older than I, and at the time I 
write of was just coming to the peak of his 
power. Conrad Archer! Who that has 
seen him or talked with him can ever forget 
him! If he were not a great painter he 
would still be a great personality. He is 
built like a viking and has a rugged face of 
the most singular male beauty—the beauty" 
of Balder. In this neurotic, feminized age 
—an age that is fighting the greatest war in 
history with quivering, disordered nerves, 
and that will infallibly be prostrated by the 
remembered horrors of it—Conrad Archer’s 
serene vigor of body and brain is almost 
overpowering. We lesser men have a way 






114 The Girl Next Door 


simply of disappearing in his presence; he 
wipes us out. He is either the last of a great 
race or forerunner of a greater race to come. 

Hardly knowing or caring where my 
steps were taking me, I had descended the 
twisting steepness of the accursed Rue de la 
Montagne Ste.-Genevieve, had reached the 
river across from Notre Dame, and had 
turned left along the embankment. It was 
just after I had passed the clanging confu¬ 
sion of the Place St.-Michel that I saw Con¬ 
rad Archer—six feet two of him, a blond 
giant in loose-fitting bronzy tweeds. He was 
planted solidly in the center of traffic beside 
one of those long low drays used in Paris 
for the transport of wine barrels, and he was 
engaged, calmly, in hauling the driver of the 
dray from his seat with the evident intention 
of chastising him. A crowd was gathering; 
a crowd that seemed hostile to the blond 
giant. I shouldered my way pretty roughly 
through the crowd and joined him. 


The Girl Next Door 115 

“What’s wrong?” I cried. “Let me help 
you!” 

“Thanks,” he replied, dragging the carter 
from his seat with a final heave, collaring 
him, and shaking him like a suit of old 
clothes. A menacing growl of protest ran 
through the crowd. He turned on them and 
they fell back perceptibly from the blue 
flame of his eyes. Then in fluent, idiomatic 
French, which he visibly punctuated by rat¬ 
tling the bones of the helpless carter, he 
addressed them. 

“You’re on this brute’s side because he’s 
French and I’m English. How stupid of 
you! We have brutes in England, too; they 
may not beat their horses, but they do their 
wives—and I’ve had a go at more than one 
of them! As for this species of offal—his 
cart’s overloaded and his treatment of his 
horses is a disgrace to civilization. Ah— 
here’s a sergeant de ville at last! Take this 
low bully in charge, will you? . . . But cer- 



116 The Girl Next Door 


tainly—for overloading and abusing his- 

what! . . . Oh, very well, take me in charge 
then! And my friend with me!” I looked 
about for his friend, only to discover that he 
referred to me. “And I promise you one 
thing, sergeant—I’m going to make this a 
celebrated case before I’m done with it. 
We’ll have this matter thoroughly aired 
before you’re many days older. I’m going 
to get this case publicly tried, sergeant, in 
every newspaper of London and Paris.” 

Throughout this harangue the ruffled car¬ 
ter, in an undertone, seemed to be discussing 
the manners and customs of camels and 
soiled swine. But now, suddenly, the senti¬ 
ment of the crowd, and with it the sergeant 
de ville , turned against him. 

The English milord was right, came ran¬ 
dom vociferations, both male and female. 
To treat one’s horses like that—it was infa¬ 
mous! No man of heart could be expected 
to endure it; and so on. The sergeant de 




The Girl Next Door 117 


ville reprimanded the carter sharply, in well- 
chosen words; he also apologized to the 
English milord . It had assuredly never been 
his intention to arrest him. He trusted that 
under the circumstances—in view of the fact 
that he would himself see to the amelioration 
of the load—a regrettable incident might be 
considered as closed. 

“Come along,” said the English milord> 
seizing me by the elbow. “Let’s wade out 
of this muck!” 

A path opened before him and together 
we strode on to the Pont Neuf and crossed 
it to the island, coming to a sudden stop 
before the gallant, satirically smiling effigy 
of Henri IV. Then the English milord gave 
a great disgusted laugh from .the depths of 
him, and a black-aproned midinette speed¬ 
ing by piped at him over a lifted shoulder, 
“A h, v’l 'a le volcan! P J is apresV’ And the 
English milord laughed louder than before, 
all his disgust vanishing. 


118 ,The Girl Next Moor 

“I love them! I love Paris and every¬ 
thing in it,” he exclaimed, “except those 
damned carters!” 

Such were the beginnings of my devotion. 
He insisted on taking me to a near-by cafe 
for a bock. He told me who he was, which 
abashed me; and he made me tell him who 
I was, which abashed me more. Then: 
“What’s that roll under your arm?” he de¬ 
manded. “Drawings?” And he reached for 
them and spread them before him on the 
table. 

“Good Lord!” was his comment. “I 
wondered why I liked you so much at first 
sight. Now I know.” 

"Within two weeks I had crossed the chan¬ 
nel with Conrad Archer to slave for him, as 
a fanatic though much coddled apprentice, 
on his magnificently audacious mural dec¬ 
orations for the assize courts at B-. Art 

is long, life short. Thus much I quickly 
learned now that my true labors had begun. 



The Girl Next Door 119 


A sharp, sanative lesson; the cold douche 
that stimulates talent and kills off conceit. 

Ars long a - There is never quite time 

enough left to attain perfection. 

From this time on, I confess, there was 
little room in my thoughts for the past. 
What was done, was done; and there was 
so much to do. The incident of Laurestine 
slipped from my consciousness for months 
at a time; it was almost as if it had never 
been. 

But you can now readily see why it in¬ 
terested me to learn from Laurestine that 
throughout these crowded, swift-flying years 
I had been the oblivious father of a living, 
growing, possibly attractive, possibly insuf¬ 
ferable, but in either case wholly unbeliev¬ 
able, son. 



XIII 


F OR I did not at once believe her. It 
was too incredible that Laurestine, 
having borne me a son, should have 
made no earlier effort to call this rather im¬ 
portant fact to my attention. But in the 
end I was forced to believe her, though I 
admit the preposterousness of her story. 
Told by any other woman I should simply 
have laughed it away. Told almost casually 
by Laurestine it carried for me its own 
peculiar credentials. Briefly, the fantastic 
circumstances were these: 

At the time she had left me, swept forth 
like a detached leaf by the frenzy of her 
mother, Laurestine did not know that she 
was enceinte . Mme. Meran had whirled her 
off toward Auteuil, as I rather more than 

suspected, blowing her straight into the sub- 

120 


The Girl Next Door 121 

urban villa of her second father; but what 
I could hardly have known was that her 
second father was not at all pleased by this 
intrusion. He was a fairly good-natured 
celebrity, I infer, but with a full share of 
Olympian selfishness, quite capable of feel¬ 
ing with Goethe that “it is sweet to see the 
moon rise while the sun is still mildly shin¬ 
ing . 5 ’ And it appears that just at this 
period the sun of Mme. Meran was begin¬ 
ning to shine for him very, very mildly in¬ 
deed. I have no information as to the 
indubitably rising moon. 

But I make out, dimly enough, a scene of 

some sort, ending in M.- 5 s temporary 

capitulation; also further and increasingly 
violent scenes taking place almost daily for 
a Gehenna of several weeks. And then 
Mme. Meran vanished, tout court; leaving 

a note for M.-, poor Olympian, which 

Laurestine told me read somewhat in this 
way: 




122 The Girl Next Door 

“You are a faithless animal and I hate 
you; but at least I regard you, and shall 
always regard you, as a second father to 
Laurestine. God be praised, the care I have 
lavished upon her has not been wasted; you 
will find her submissive. Count—but for 
reasons of state I must withhold his name—• 
has long urged me to visit Holy Russia 
under his protection, and—chiefly for Lau- 
restine’s sake—I go. In the absence of one 
who has sacrificed much for you, and whose 
heart you have desolated, I know that your 
conscience will speak. You will not neglect 
the future of an unfortunate and innocent 
child because of your pig-like animosity to¬ 
ward her broken-hearted mother.” 

She left no address. 

It was just about this time that Laures¬ 
tine was forced reluctantly to admit to 
herself that she was with child. For her, 
in the circumstances, it could be only a dis¬ 
agreeable discovery, and coupled with her 




The Girl Next Door 123 


mother’s inopportune desertion it com¬ 
pletely unnerved her. She was by nature 
incapable of forming a plan. The very 
thought of childbirth frightened her into 
whimpering fatuity. For a week she crept 
into corners and shivered and mopped her 
eyes; and her irritated second father—who 
didn’t like to look at anybody whose fish- 
white face had a red, rubbed little nose stuck 
on it — wondered how the devil any sane 
being could grieve like that over the loss of 
Toto. Then to crown all, Laurestine, at 
her wit’s end, having no one else to appeal 
to, confessed her plight to him and told him 
she wanted to die; she was entirely certain 
she wanted to die—but not like that! It was 
such an ugly way to die! And wouldn’t he 
please be nicer to her? 

To do M.-justice, he seems to have 

made up his mind to rise to this crisis as 
swiftly as possible, the sooner to have done 
with it. He began, sensibly, by pointing out 



124 The Girl Next Door 

to Laurestine that she was not the less a 
married woman because she had deserted her 
husband—or he her, whichever it was! Such 
details didn’t intrigue him sufficiently for 
retention. And since her child would be 
legitimate and its father was still presum¬ 
ably alive and in Paris somewhere, the first 
step was assuredly to find him. For as to 
his having spent all his money—absurd! 

M.-, for one, didn’t believe it. These 

Americans always had money, confound 
them! Or if now and then one of them 
became momentarily embarrassed, there was 
certain to be some steer-killing relative in 
Shee-cago who would come to the rescue— 
comme fa! That is, at a snapped finger, a 
wave of the hand! 

The chances were, the redskin had simply 
cooked up an excuse for escaping from a 
responsibility he’d grown tired of. That ar¬ 
rives ! Or possibly he’d discovered how Toto 
had let him in! “Let’s be frank, Laurestine. 




The Girl Next Door 125 

He was an imbecile to marry you. Toto 
would have sold you to him on much easier 
terms. You know that as well as I do.” 

It was precisely here that M.- over¬ 

reached himself. 

For, to do Laurestine justice as well, she 
knew nothing of the kind. It was always a 
question what Laurestine knew or did not 
know, and she knew many things she had 
better not have known; but it seems certain 
that she had always believed her mother— 
in spite of a marked social handicap, which 
she understood very well—could and would 
find her a rich, indulgent husband. Her 
mother had promised her to do so ever since 
she, Laurestine, was a tiny girl; and she had 
had faith in her mothers practicality al¬ 
ways. So, in spite of the bald fact of Mme. 
Meran’s flight, she resented M.-’s bru¬ 

talities; hotly resented them — in the end, 
hysterically. 

All of which, added to former exaspera- 


i 




126 The Girl Next Door 

tions, mounted to M.-’s head, and he 

hotly, and in the end hysterically, resented 
her resentment. Well —“fa arrive!” The 
upshot being, that Laurestine’s second 
father gave her five thousand francs, showed 
her to the door, and washed his hands of her 
forever. So, at least, he said. Perhaps it 
was not really his intention to abandon her 
so callously. Perhaps the poor Olympian 
was not at the moment wholly responsible 
for his actions. He is dead now; his works 
are among the permanent glories of France. 

From that moment on, Laurestine’s ac¬ 
count to me of her haphazard driftings grew 
rather sketchy and obscure. She seems 
easily to have found work in the studios 
until her condition became apparent; at 
which time she seems to have been honestly 
befriended by a young Breton painter, who 
sent her down to his old mother in Quimper. 
There her child was born and proved a 
healthy infant. Throughout the following 



The Girl Next Door 127 


year Laurestine stayed on in Brittany, go¬ 
ing at last to Pont Aven, where both she and 
her sturdy baby posed for the artist colony 
during a not unhappy summer. Much seems 
to have been made of that baby by the artist 
colony, and Laurestine seems to have grown 
very proud of it in her semi-detached way. 

With winter she returned again to Paris, 
and there she met Anton Hrdlika. Anton, 
that winter, was hovering — with a certain 
uncertainty due, doubtless, to alcohol — on 
the verge of a succ&s fou. Laurestine as¬ 
sured me that “tout Paris ”—translate, “sev¬ 
eral young enthusiasts”—believed him to be 
the coming man; whether as painter or vio¬ 
linist she did not make quite clear. It is 
obvious that he soon took possession of Lau¬ 
restine. I make out, but mistily, a Mont¬ 
martre period, followed by a general drift¬ 
ing about together over the face of Europe, 
and a final adventure, en famille , to a new 
and, it was to be hoped, less temperamental 




128 The Girl Next Door 


world. Nothing further of Laurestine’s 
second etc . came into the story, nor of Mme. 
Meran; nor, for the matter of that, of me. 
This I could bear. But there were two or 
three other little enigmas to which I was less 
indifferent—which, indeed, I determined at 
once to solve. 

“And now that you’ve been so tardily 
open with me, Laurestine, would you mind 
very much answering three or four ques¬ 
tions?” 

She gave me the old pathetic lift of eyes. 
“Why should I mind, Alfred?” 

“First of all, then—why are you here?” 

“You’re my husband, Alfred—or aren’t 
you? Have you divorced me?” 

“No. It might have been wiser. But I’ve 
been too busy to bother with such things. 
And I’ve had no desire to marry again.” 

“Then you are my husband, you see—and 
I’ve come home. I’ve learned my lesson, 
Alfred. If you’ll just be a little nice to 



The Girl Next Door 129 

me again—as you were once? I’ll not be 
any trouble to you; you can live as you 
please; I’ll not interfere. And you’ll not 
be ashamed of me. These horrible cheap 
clothes—I hated to come back like this. But 
I’m still pretty, Alfred; you can see for 
yourself how pretty I am. And then there’s 
Bela.” 

“Bela?” 

“Your son, Alfred. We called him Bela 
Hrdlika, Anton and I. It made everything 
more comfortable all round. Bela thinks 
Anton is his father.” 

“Do you happen to feel at all, Laures- 
tine, what enormities these things are—these 
things you mention as trifles, so casually?” 

“Enormities?” Her face clouded and 
sharpened; she put forth tentative claws. 
“It’s easy enough for you to say that, now 
that you’re rich again. I wonder what sort 
of things you’d have to confess to, if you 
told me the truth? And if I’d stuck to you 



130 The Girl Next Door 

when you were foutu —well, Alfred, you 
would have had to support me and the baby 
—and where would you be now? Where 
Anton is, perhaps. Oh, you’ve nothing to 
complain of! You’ve had your freedom— 
while I’ve been kicked about! And”—the 
claws just curved out for an instant—“after 
all, it was you who drove me away. And 
you did deceive me and maman —about your 
being rich, I mean. You can’t deny that; 
and you wouldn’t like the truth about it to 
be common property, would you? When 
you talk of enormities, Alfred, please re¬ 
member your own.” 

There was a twisted justice in her re¬ 
minder; I was forced to acknowledge to 
myself that Laurestine had heavily scored. 
She was playing with stacked cards, per¬ 
haps; cheating a little, perhaps; but she had 
scored. And in the end, as I began to see 
clearly, she would win the game. For I 
couldn’t honorably refuse to play with her. 


The Girl Next Door 131 


pretty much on her own terms. She wasn’t 
an ordinary adventuress; not in any sense. 
Her return was far from being a shrewdly 
calculated attempt at blackmail. Laures- 
tine was now and always would be funda¬ 
mentally naive . It was simply that the 
stray kitten needed a corner of my hearth¬ 
rug, now that I again had a hearthrug and 
a tended hearth. She wouldn’t bother me 

—much. She’d curl up in her corner if I’d 

/' 

let her; only—I must let her! The stray 
kitten was thus far desperate; didn’t intend 
to be left outside any longer in the cold. 
And feeling the force of this, I couldn’t 
blame her; for my soul, I couldn’t! After 
all, a stray kitten is a stray kitten the world 
over, and the man who will not warm it and 
feed it when it mews at his door is not him¬ 
self likely to mew later on with much success 
at the doorsills of heaven. 

Moreover — and I confess my heart, 
whose valves, you remember, were not tim- 


132 The Girl Next Door 


ing perfectly, pounded at the thought—this 
was not just any stray kitten! I confess 
that inadequate figure vanished as the 
thought thudded through me: “For you this 
woman is not a stranger and can never be 
an outcast. She is part—a disturbing, ironic 
part—of your destiny forever. She is the 
mother of your child.” 

“Tell me about Bela,” I said. “But wait 
—I’ll order lunch first.” I rang for Li Po, 
who was quickly before us, silently respect¬ 
ful, faintly smiling. “Li Po,” I informed 
him, “this lady is Mrs. Elliman, my wife.” 
His face did not change. “We separated 
years ago, long before you joined me. 
Please get us something good—something a 
little special, Li Po.” 

“Vely please to meet,” said Li Po to Lau-* 
restine; then bowed and withdrew. 

“Now, Laurestine—tell me about Bela! 
Where is he? When can I see him?” 

“Your servant thinks I’m pretty,” said 


The Girl Next Door 133 

Laurestine. “Did you notice, Alfred, the 
way he looked at me?” 

It took me until late that night to win 
from Laurestine a patchwork account of 
Bela and his sadly grotesque upbringing; 
but at last I was in possession of all it was 
immediately essential for me to know. Li 
Po had prepared my little-used guest room 
for Laurestine, who had brought with her all 
her worldly goods in a battered hand satchel. 
When she had retired, frankly yawning in 
my face with fatigue as she said good night, 
I remember sitting on hour after hour till 
dawn, sifting the odds and ends she had let 
fall before me, and selecting from them de¬ 
tails that struck me as significant in the 
history of my unknown son — details that 
threw, or seemed to me to throw, even the 
feeblest ray on his temperament, his char¬ 
acter, and hence on his probable destiny. 

It was my purpose to motor down to Bel¬ 
cher’s Casino, near Trenton, starting at once 


134 The Girl Next Door 


after an early breakfast. From that en¬ 
vironment, I felt, Bela could not be rescued 
too soon. During the trip down, after a 
bath and hot coffee, when my head would, I 
hoped, be clearer, I meant to form some 
definite plan of approach to this singular 
boy of mine. From Laurestine I had gained 
an impression, a strong one, that it would 
not be easy to win his confidence. And then, 
too, there was the annoying problem of the 
drug-crazed Anton which must equally be 
met and solved. It was obvious that a man 
in his condition, as described by Laurestine, 
could not simply be abandoned to his fate; 
it was further obvious that, whatever steps 
were taken for his relief, he must be kept 
in ignorance of my identity and of the 
whereabouts of Laurestine. The beginning 
day was likely to prove emotionally tense, a 
series of agitating crises, and in advance of 
it I was conscious of a somewhat painful 
degree of physical and nervous exhaustion. 


The Girl Next Door 135 


This would not do. I decided that the shock 
of a cold plunge — a form of stimulus for¬ 
bidden me—would be more than worth the 
very slight risk of it. It would give me just 
the sharp, clarifying reaction my system 
needed. 

What it gave me was two gasping weeks 
in bed, on a light diet of digitalis and 
strychnine, and another two or three weeks 
there of what seemed to me interminable las¬ 
situde. Li Po, sketchily aided now and then 
by Laurestine, took care of me, and under 
the prompting of an efficient heart special¬ 
ist—who understood the heart of man as a 
complicated pump, and also as a more com¬ 
plicated passion—they both lied to me, day 
in, day out; that is, they told me I was not 
going to die—which they did not believe. 
The fact that I did not die does not alter the 
subjective falseness of their assertions. 

During that first fortnight of my illness, 
then, I was in no state to direct either my 




136 The Girl Next Door 


own affairs or the activities of others; but 
when I had definitely rallied, my distress 
over my failure to rescue Bela from Bel¬ 
cher’s joint and the vagaries of his supposed 
father grew intolerable. 

“Surely,” I demanded of Laurestine, 
“you’ve seen him—communicated with him, 
at least?” 

She shook her head. “No, Alfred. I’ve 
been so worried about you, night and day. 
I’ve had no thoughts for anything else. 
And I’d no idea what you had in mind— 
as to me, I mean—or Bela. I didn’t even 
know whether you had decided to—let me 
stay?” 

I groaned with feeble impatience. 

“Of course you’re to stay—and Bela must 
join us! Bring Li Po to me at once. I’ll 
explain to you both how you must act for 
me.” 

“But the doctor says, Alfred-” 

“Oh, damn him! Do you think I can lie 



The Girl Next Door 137 

here worrying like this and live through an¬ 
other night? I want to see Bela, do you 

hear me! I want him brought to me-” 

“Yes, yes,” she said hastily, interrupting 
me and laying her fingers an instant on my 
lips, “I understand now—and you mustn’t 
excite yourself, Alfred. There’s no need for 
it. Please leave everything to Li Po and 
me. We’ll see somehow that Bela comes on 
just as soon as it can possibly be arranged.” 
“To-day?” ' 7 

“Perhaps. Or—to-morrow. The doctor 

may think best to- Oh, please, Alfred, 

don’t begin again! Li Po’s so clever. I’m 
sure he can run down and get in touch with 
Bela, without letting Belcher or Anton 
know where I am. Don’t you see, Alfred— 
I’m horribly afraid of Anton? He might 

kill me if he knew-” 

A drug-crazed man—yes, it was a possi¬ 
bility that I, too, feared. “Well,” I said, 
“please bring me Li Po, Laurestine. He’ll 





138 The Girl Next Door 

need little more than a hint; he was born 
subtle and diplomatic. He’ll know what to 
do. And I promise you not to grow excited 
again.” 

Li Po slipped down that afternoon to 
Trenton, making his way thence to Bel¬ 
cher’s Casino; and there he discovered two 
things: Anton Hrdlika, the crazy fiddler, 
was dead and buried; Bela Hrdlika, the son, 
his father’s fiddle under his arm, had stepped 
out from the door and vanished. No one 
at Belcher’s had the sprout of an idea what 
had become of him; no one cared. And 
secretly Li Po was delighted, as I later dis¬ 
covered to my amazement, that these things 
were so. For Li Po, though I knew it not, 
was beginning with Oriental thoroughness 
and caution to mature certain hidden pur¬ 
poses not wholly consistent with his hitherto 
unqualified devotion to me. 

Yet to this hour I am not certain Li Po 
would have pursued these purposes if he had 


The Girl Next Door 139 


thought them disloyal. Quite possibly he 
may have felt that Laurestine sooner or 
later must prove a disturbing force in my 
life, and— However, this is not the place 
for these vain speculations. Brush in hand, 
I have a feeling for design; but pen in hand, 
I am helpless, merely floundering about—as 
you, dear Miss Miniter, will be the first to 
perceive and tell me! 


XIV 


A LREADY I have passed well be¬ 
yond the incidents called back by Re¬ 
morse for my discomfort throughout 
the interminable night that followed on my 
first meeting with Bela. With the period 
of something over two months separating 
the trip of Li Po to Belcher’s joint and my 
arrival at Mrs. Kingery’s, Remorse—I am 
happy to feel, for once—has nothing to do. 

For ten days or more Laurestine, Li Po, 
and the doctor answered all my inquiries as 
to Bela with firm evasions. By indirect 
statement I was led to believe that he hov¬ 
ered somewhere in the offing and would ap¬ 
pear just as soon as the doctor thought me 
strong enough for the excitement of his 
coming. Laurestine had taken the doctor 

into her confidence, giving him, I judge, a 

140 


The Girl Next Door 141 

sternly edited and highly sentimentalized ac¬ 
count of our family history. This account 
had stirred all his latent romantic sympa¬ 
thies, and he had promised Laurestine to do 
everything in his power to help her find Bela. 
On his advice a private detective was en¬ 
gaged—by Li Po, always discreet and only 
too eager to be of service,—but up to the 
time I rose from my bed and demanded 
a final explanation he had accomplished 
nothing. 

It was then thought best to give me the 
facts and risk my reaction to them. My 
first reaction was chiefly temper, that I had 
been kept in ignorance so long, wasting 
precious moments! My second was to dis¬ 
miss the private detective and take charge 
myself of the search for Bela. Why, I in¬ 
sisted, had not the straight course been 
steered of advertising for information? If 
Bela had not changed his name—and why 
should he ?—and if nothing sinister had hap- 


142 The Girl Next Door 

pened to him—which was unlikely—persist¬ 
ent advertising in the morning and evening 
papers of New York, Philadelphia, Boston, 
and Chicago would almost certainly bring 
results. This course, I was then informed 
by Li Po, he had personally forbidden to the 
detective, fearing the whole affair might 
become unpleasantly notorious. I rebuked 
him for his folly, so little characteristic, 
pointing out that it was unnecessary to ad¬ 
vertise in my name, but that personally I 
now preferred to do so, since the important 
thing was to find Bela at once. I was not 
ashamed, I added, of having a legitimate 
son; I was only ashamed of having neglect¬ 
ed him, even if through ignorance, for so 
many years. 

It was then that Laurestine drew me 
aside and told me that before I began to ad¬ 
vertise openly for Bela she had a little con¬ 
fession to make; she didn’t know quite what 
to think herself, but it was possible it might 


The Girl Next Door 143 


affect my decision. While dropping these 
hints she avoided my eyes; her manner puz¬ 
zled and troubled me. I dismissed Li Po, 
and turned back to her with a sense of irri¬ 
tation. It exasperated me that the whims 
and childish mistakes of this futile woman 
should now once more intrude themselves 
upon me and alter, whether I would or no, 
the pattern of my thoughts and desires—of 
my life. 

“See here, Laurestine,” I said crossly, “is 
there to be no end to your peculiar revela¬ 
tions? Can’t we have a clean breast of it 
and see exactly where we stand? Why 
should there be any further mysteries be¬ 
tween us?” 

She pouted a little, looking very charm¬ 
ing as she did so. I had told her to outfit 
herself with whatever she needed, and dur¬ 
ing my illness she had taken every advan¬ 
tage of the suggestion. Her instinctive 
flair for the becoming kept her on the side 


144 The Girl Next Door 


of simplicity; she could hardly have made 
her selections with a finer tact or with higher 
confidence in the lining of my purse. The 
foulard morning dress she then wore 
matched and so deepened her night-blue 
eyes; a favorite trick of hers, which only a 
disillusioned husband could find too obvious 
to be entirely successful. Rightly clothed 
again, one felt that an inner peace had de¬ 
scended upon her. Even her pout was 
moderated to the merest passing hint of dis¬ 
satisfaction. 

“My dear Alfred,” she answered me, 
“you know all there is to know—except this 
one little thing. But it’s not very easy to 
tell you about it. I don’t believe it really 
matters—or will matter, now! Bela,” she 
added after the slightest pause, “is a queer, 
intense boy. Poor Anton simply adored 
him, and was very jealous of his devotion 
to me. You’ve no idea how Bela worships 
me. I’m sure I can’t imagine why. But 




The Girl Next Door 145 


it’s really for his sake I left Anton—came 
back to you. Naturally, Alfred, I had to 
find out first how it would all go; I couldn’t 
confide my plans to Bela. And I’m afraid 

he has a very false impression about you— 

« 

about the way you once treated me; I’m 
afraid he hates the very thought of you.” 

“What’s that!” I cried. “Why, you’ve 
said in so many words that he knows noth¬ 
ing of me—not even that I exist!” 

“Have I, Alfred? But he does know— 
only, not properly; not as he should. That’s 
what I’m trying to tell you.” She paused. 
“It wouldn’t do for you, Alfred, to make 
yourself known to him—unless I had seen 
him, talked to him, first.” 

“Why not, please?” 

“It wouldn’t be safe.” 

She said it quietly. I stared at her. I 
repeated her words. 

“It wouldn’t be safe?” 

“It might not be. You can’t tell with 



146 The Girl Next Door 


Bela. So much depends on whether or not 
he’s been playing—” 

“Playing?” I babbled at her, for the 
words seemed meaningless. 

“Yes. Playing Anton’s violin. It has 

* 

the strangest effect on Bela—terrifying, 
really.” 

“Wait!” I struck in. “Be silent! Now 
answer my questions, truthfully, as I ask 
them, will you?” 

“Of course, Alfred,” she pouted—“if 
you’ll not be cross with me. I don’t want 
anything awful to happen—now.” 

If you will take a highly strung, impres¬ 
sionable child and bring it up in the way it 
should not go, you can achieve the most 
astounding results; that, chiefly, is what I 
learned during my second painstakingly 
polite and patient cross-examination of 
Laurestine. 

Bela had had snatches of schooling here 
and there, but mostly what he knew he had 


The Girl Next Door 147 


picked up for himself, and a deal that he 
had picked up from Laurestine and his sup¬ 
posed father was such stuff as nightmares 
are made of. He was a beautiful baby; an 
extraordinarily beautiful little boy; and al¬ 
most from the first this seems, by some odd 
twist of self-deception, to have flattered 
Anton’s grotesque vanity. He seems to 
have delighted in posing as Bela’s father; 
seems indeed before long to have persuaded 
himself that he was Bela’s father. Laures¬ 
tine says that even in private, between them¬ 
selves, he would not tolerate any reference 
to Bela’s true paternity. And he grew 
increasingly jealous of Bela’s devotion to 
Laurestine; indeed, a sort of rancorous con¬ 
test for Bela’s affection seems early to have 
started into being. I gathered from Laur¬ 
estine that Bela was naturally a quiet child, 
living so constantly in a world of his own 
imaginings that he was not self-assertive and 
gave very little trouble. 


148 The Girl Next Door 


When Bela was only five, Anton began 
teaching him to play on a little fiddle he had 
had specially made for him. By the time 
he was ten, Anton openly predicted that he 
would become a great virtuoso. He started 
talking of a grand concert tour with Bela in 
another year or so, over there in America. 
Father and son! It would be a novelty. 
It would mean riches and fame. 

But Laurestine says she knew nothing 
would come of it. Anton was fuddled with 
absinthe most of the time; and Bela, who 
stole every hour he could from practice to 
cover sheets of paper with naively original 
designs, had already confided to her a 
strange impression that had somehow found 
entry into his lonely little head. 

“I know why papa drinks too much and 
is hateful to you,” so he told her; “it’s be¬ 
cause he has given up painting for music. 
Music’s bad for people. I think God made 
painting and the devil made music. I do.” 


The Girl Next Door 149 


Shortly after this Anton bought his last 
violin from the widow of the chef d’orchestre 
at Trouville, giving his old one to Bela. 
And from that day on the fortunes of the 
Hrdlika menage steadily declined. A year 
or so later, at Bordeaux, they had reached 
a very low ebb. There was a sudden flight 
from debts and disaster to America, the land 
of beginnings-over. But Anton Hrdlika 
could not leave his destiny behind him. 

Small need to trace in detail the Ameri¬ 
can misadventures of the Hrdlika menage! 
But I was able to discern at last why Laur- 
estine had not sooner fled from Anton; why 
she now felt uncomfortable over possibilities 
latent in my attempt to find Bela and make 
myself known to him; and the meaning of 
her reference to the sinister effect on him of 
playing Anton’s violin. 

She had not fled from Anton, taking Bela 
with her, as she had long since desired to 
do, because Anton, suspecting this, had told 


150 The Girl Next Door 


her, with a crazy intensity carrying its own 
conviction, that any attempt on her part to 
remove Bela from him could have but one 
result—her death, Bela’s, and his own. He 
would follow and find them, no matter 
where or when; and this Laurestine shud- 
deringly believed. In the old days she 
might not have taken his melodrama seri¬ 
ously; now she took it seriously. All the 
difference lay in one word—“cocaine.” 

Life thus became a dull torture to her, 
shadowed by fear; and, by a curious trans¬ 
ference, since she had neither the will nor 
courage to strike at Anton, a living, evil 
presence, she began to seek mental relief in 
putting the blame for all her misfortunes 
on one who had become for her little more 
than a wraith. I, certainly, could not harm 
her, so she took to hating and striking out 
at me. Bela finding her one day in tears, 
she confessed to him on a sudden impulse 
that she was not married to Anton; she was 



The Girl Next Door 151 

a wicked, wretched woman—the most mis¬ 
erable in the world. But it wasn’t her fault. 
She had been treated like a dog by a hus¬ 
band who was a monster! By false pre¬ 
tenses he had induced her, a mere child, to 
marry him; he had tired of her in a few 
weeks and cast her forth penniless to starve, 
and so on. But even then, fearful of An¬ 
ton’s jealous rage, she dared not tell Bela 
he was that inhuman monster’s son; nor did 
she mention the monster’s name. 

The effect of these revelations on a sensi¬ 
tive boy, already depressed and overstrained 
by his sordid contacts with life, could only 
be devastating. 

Anton, his supposed father, had always 
treated Bela with extravagant kindness 
varied by brief spasms of cruelty. Bela, 
moreover, was an artist by instinct, and 
even as a little fellow his whole being re¬ 
sponded to the occasional flashes of aesthetic 
power Anton’s disintegrating nature put 


152 The Girl Next Door 


forth. He could not love Anton, but he 
could not be indifferent to him; and, gradu¬ 
ally, to account for all this, he convinced 
himself that Anton was a good and great 
man into whom an authentic demon had en¬ 
tered; and later on, as we know, the boy’s 
undisciplined imagination gave this evil 
spirit—or was it another even more terrible? 
—a specific home-office within the polished 
belly of a specific fiddle. 

When, therefore, his mother told him of 
her past, he felt an implacable hatred toward 
the nameless man who had wronged her 
sweep through him. To revenge his mother 
on that villain became a romantic duty, a 
mission in life to be scrupulously fulfilled. 
Anton now, by comparison, seemed to him 
merely a pitiable being; he, at least, had 
received and sheltered Lally when that 
unspeakable one had driven her from him! 
Laurestine admits that Bela’s indignation 
was balm to her—she knows not why; ad- 


The Girl Next Door 153 


mits she deliberately played upon it and 
heightened it. But in the end it frightened 
her; she was aware suddenly that she had 
gone too far. 

This was one night at Belcher’s joint, 
when Anton was too ill or too cantankerous 
to play. “I’ll play for them,” said Bela. 
He went into the dining-room with Mile. 
d’Aubigny, his mother. He paid no atten¬ 
tion to murmurs of disappointment from 
frequenters of the casino. He stood up, 
tall, straight, pale, and tucked his father’s 
fiddle—that demonic fiddle—beneath his 
chin. Laurestine did not know until the 
first notes sounded that he had discarded 
his own and helped himself to Anton’s vio¬ 
lin; then she knew. She had never heard 
Bela play as he played that night. The 
boy, in spite of Anton’s teaching and earlier 
predictions, had never become a really good 
performer; he had a fairly sound technique 
and a true ear, but he lacked fire, person- 



154 The Girl Next Door 

ality—his heart was not in it; or never had 
been until now. But that night the strings 
vibrated with sinister passion; and when 
Laurestine, startled, looked round at Bela, 
she saw a face distorted, stiffened to a white 
mask of rage. 

The diners at Belcher’s joint were not 
pleased by this performance; there was 
something in it they did not understand— 
that rubbed them the wrong way. It was an 
intense improvisation, and, so far, like one 
of the crazy fiddler’s; but, unlike his, it was 
not surcharged with sensuality; it was in¬ 
tense, but somber and austere. The ap¬ 
plause at its conclusion was perfunctory. 
Bela bowed curtly and, offering his arm to 
Mile. d’Aubigny, withdrew. Erotic jazz, 
by the four depressed colored ge’men, fol¬ 
lowed, to the diners’ effervescent relief. 

Bud Belcher, waiting in the performers’ 
anteroom, was wheezily sarcastic and pro¬ 
fane; told Bela never to go in there and 


The Girl Next Door 155 


play again; he was a joke. It is doubtful 
if Bela so much as heard him. He followed 
his mother upstairs, then drew her aside into 
his partitioned cubicle. 

“Lally,” he said, drawing a dry tongue 
over chalk-dry lips, “what’s his name and 
where is he—that man?” 

“But, Bela dear, what’s come over 
you? Your eyes! Why do you want to 
know?” 

“I must know.” 

“Why?” 

“You know why, Lally. A man like that 
has no right to live.” 

She saw he meant it; his strange improv¬ 
isation had meant just that—a dedication 
to revenge. She was terrified. He plead¬ 
ed with her; he commanded; for the first 
time in his life he was short and harsh with 
her. But terror gave her will to withstand 
him. She had gone too far; the boy was 
dangerously overwrought. Already she had 


156 The Girl Next Door 


had more than enough of this sort of thing 
from life. 

She would not give him the name of the 
man she had so casually taught him to hate. 
She warned Anton not to tell him; and An¬ 
ton, thinking she had revealed to Bela his 
true paternity, struck her. She did not re¬ 
sent the blow; she begged him to listen to 
her; she explained what she had done, and 
her present fear. Anton called her every 
foul name in his polyglot vocabulary. This 
didn’t concern her; she had heard them 
all before; and now at least she felt safe 
again. She knew that Anton, too, would 
be dumb. 

But she didn’t sleep that night. What a 
fool she’d been these past years! A new 
path toward freedom opened—shimmered. 
Why in heaven’s name had she never before 
considered that possibility? Alfred Elliman 
was in America, was a successful painter; 
she had lately read his name in the papers 


The Girl Next Door 157 


many times. Perhaps—perhaps if he knew 
that Bela was indeed his son— 

Less than a week later she had tiptoed, 
one hour before dawn, from Bud Belcher’s 
joint. . . . 

My basic problem, it was now clear, was 
far other than I had supposed. I must still 
find Bela, but in a different way, and finally 
in a different sense. I must find him and 
teach him to care for me, trust me, before 
revealing my identity. I must first teach 
him to find whatever little there was of good 
in me, if I were ever truly to find my son. 

I placed the following inconspicuous ad¬ 
vertisement in two morning and two even¬ 
ing papers: 

“Present address of Bela Hrdlika de¬ 
sired . Answer, P. O. Box -■, Trenton , 

N. J. B.B.” 

This was tentative, merely. My thought 



158 The Girl Next Door 


was that if this advertisement should be seen 
by Bela himself he would interpret the ini¬ 
tials “B. B.” as those of Bud Belcher; and 
before loosing this ballon d'essai I had taken 
a room in Trenton for a week, had hired the 
necessary post-office box, and had intro¬ 
duced myself under a false name, as a law¬ 
yer, to Bud Belcher, that ungenial ruffian. 
My explanation to him was no truer than 
he deserved. I knew it would never do to 
rouse his suspicion that there was anything 
in my inquiry that might be turned to his 
own advantage. I was merely, I told him, 
trying to recover for a client a piece of un- 
paid-for property—namely, the violin on 
which the man calling himself Hrdlika, since 
deceased, had played, while a performer at 
Belcher’s Casino. I had learned through 
detectives that Hrdlika’s son had carried 
this violin away with him; and so on. By 
a payment of fifty dollars I easily secured 
Bud’s promise to let me know if he should 


The Girl Next Door 159 


himself receive any word of Bela, or directly 
from him. It was fifty dollars wasted. 

Two mornings later I unlocked my post- 
office box and found a pink envelope smell¬ 
ing vilely of some nameless sachet. I opened 
it and read: 

“Tlieys a feller works here for Nuxone 
Bela Hrdlika. If thats him your after 1 
wisht to God you got sumthing on him . If 
theys any reward you believe me III use it . 

“If your a gent yours in hopes to here 

“Sadie Hat.” 

Not being a gent, I never replied to this 
letter, which was undated, but which had a 
curly monogram stamped in silver in its left 
upper corner, and a fancy heading also 
stamped in silver: 

“26 Fuschia Street 

Oakdale Terrace , N. JF 


XV 


I DID not immediately go down to Oak¬ 
dale Terrace. I went to a reputable 
agency, engaged a private detective, 
and sent him there in my stead with explicit 
instructions. He was merely to ascertain 
whether the Bela Hrdlika at Oakdale Ter¬ 
race was a boy of eighteen who had former¬ 
ly lived with his father Anton Hrdlika, de¬ 
ceased, at Belcher’s Casino, near Trenton. 
If so, he was to find out where and under 
what conditions he was now living, and, if 
possible, rent a room in the same house with 
him and stay in it for a week or two, giving 
it up suddenly. I should then be on hand to 
step into his shoes. 

Except that the detective, who pottered 
about the neighborhood meanwhile selling 

insurance, was delayed a week in gaining 

160 


i 


The Girl Next Door 161 

admission to Mrs. Kingery’s, this little plan 

/ 

worked perfectly. He lived with Mrs. 
Kingery perhaps ten days—and didn’t mind 
telling me he hated to leave there—then re¬ 
ceived the unexpected offer of a good posi¬ 
tion in Minneapolis; and I arrived at Oak¬ 
dale Terrace just in time to fall heir to the 
room he vacated. My inquiry for rentable 
rooms at Mitchell’s drug store was, of 
course, a blind. I entered Mrs. Kingery’s 
domain fully informed in advance as to its 
inmates and the generally delightful condi¬ 
tions prevailing. Not even a private detec¬ 
tive could uncover a flaw in either the char¬ 
acter or the cooking of Mrs. Kingery. 

My studio apartment I left in charge of 
Li Po and Laurestine, giving Li Po power 
of attorney to pay all bills from my bank 
account and attend in general to my not 
very complicated personal affairs. I had 
explained to them what I hoped to accom¬ 
plish at Oakdale Terrace and had told them 




162 The Girl Next Door 


I might be absent a month or more; natural¬ 
ly, I should run into town from time to time 
and report progress. Through my doctor, 
it was casually given out that I was to take 
a long rest in the country to recuperate from 
a recent severe breakdown in health. 

Laurestine said she thought my whole 
scheme suffisamment niais, but since I had 
set my heart on it she wouldn’t interfere. 
She would say, though, it would be far sim¬ 
pler for me to send her straight on to Bela; 
she was certain she could bring him home to 
me with an entirely changed mind, fully pre¬ 
pared to forgive the errors of my youth and 
to learn to like me and accept me as a pos¬ 
sible father. This in no way altered my 
decision; and I found that Li Po—whose 
judgment in delicate situations I had 
learned to respect—considered my own plan 
the more promising. I put my car at his 
disposal and instructed him to do what he 
could to make things agreeable for his new 


[The Girl Next Door 163 

mistress. Laurestine, I had noted, seemed 
for the present well content to be merely idle 
and at ease; if she was ever bored she gave 
no sign of it, and the shops and theaters 
seemed to furnish her with all the excite¬ 
ment she craved. If she yearned to see 
Bela again, she had given me no very con¬ 
vincing sign of that either. 

Thus the conditions for my venture were 
as satisfactory as possible, given the some¬ 
what disquieting circumstances involved. 

I had decided to pose at Mrs. Kingery’s 
as a not very successful author, which would 
enable me to spend as much time quietly in 
my room as I desired. It bothered me a 
little that a Miss Miniter, Mrs. Kingery’s 
star boarder, worked for a firm of New 
York publishers; but, after all, there are 
thousands of obscure authors who manage 
to make a living somehow by their pens, and 
of whom nobody has ever heard. I might 
even make good my disguise by venturing 


164 The Girl Next Door 


to ask her some day for a letter of introduc¬ 
tion to the editor of the monthly magazine 
issued by her firm. That she might recog¬ 
nize and place me never even occurred to me. 
I’ve never had a photograph taken since 
leaving college, and the one likeness of me 
—Conrad Archer’s marvelous sketch in red 
crayon—hangs in the Tate Gallery in Lon¬ 
don. 

But on the third evening after my arrival 
at Mrs. Kingery’s I was destined to receive 
a severe, though passing, shock. Bela, im¬ 
portuned by Kathleen, had remained down¬ 
stairs after dinner to tell that not very at¬ 
tractive child a fairy story. I lingered with 
them, hoping to make some little advance 
with Bela, who thus far—except for punc¬ 
tilious attention to rather un-American 
courtesies as between fellow guests—had 
pretty completely ignored me. But my 
attempt to join Bela and Kathleen was 
promptly foiled by Kingery Senior, who 


The Girl Next Door 165 


forced me into a corner, offered me a stogy, 
seated himself before me, hands on knees, 
and began a laboriously detailed account of 
English atrocities in Ireland. He’s a per¬ 
sistent old trumpeting elephant, is Kingery. 
I saw I was done for, and made haste to 
plead an unfinished article and fly upward. 
The door of my room is just across the hall 
from Miss Miniter’s, which was standing 
ajar, and she called out to me as I reached 
for my doorknob. 

“Won’t you come in a moment, Mr. Ell- 
wood? I can offer you a cigarette. Please 
do.” 

Already I liked Miss Miniter; there was 
a quiet, unforced frankness about her that 
delighted me; she so obviously, yet so un¬ 
obtrusively, in this difficult world, stood on 
her own finely arched and daintily shod feet. 
I gladly obeyed her summons. 

“I left the door open to catch you,” she 
said as I entered, “but now I’ve done so, 


166 The Girl Next Door 


please close it. You see,” she continued, 
not rising, but holding out her cigarettes to 
me with a smile it would have been impos¬ 
sible for even a Casanova to misjudge, u I’ve 
a little confession to make. I happen to 
know who you really are, and I don’t care 
to live so near you under false pretenses.” 

“You know?” I stammered. 

“Unfortunately; since I see you’d rather 
I didn’t. Of course, as you’re here incog., 
it wasn’t difficult to guess that you’d rather 
I didn’t. But I can’t help it, can I, if I do?” 

Her eyes at once reassured me. “Not 
very well,” I replied, more—though still not 
perfectly—at ease. 

“Please don’t think I’m asking an ex¬ 
planation,” she quickly added; “I’m simply 
making one. But Alfred Elliman’s rather 
a famous person, you know, to hope to sub¬ 
merge himself with entire success—even in 
Oakdale Terrace!” 

I had accepted a cigarette from her; now 



The Girl Next Door 167 


I lighted it, dawdling over the process, and 
thinking hard. Then I sank into the an¬ 
cient, upholstered armchair which fronted 
her own ancient morris chair at a comfort¬ 
able angle. 

“Miss Miniter,” I said finally, “I should 
really like to tell you all about it and ask 
your advice.” 

“Better not,” she struck in promptly; 
“you might be sorry to-morrow. Men are so 
often too impulsive. Why not wait a few 
days and think it over? And I’d much 
rather,” she hurried on, “have you tell me 
something about Conrad Archer—that is, if 
you care to. You’ve been so close to him 
—and he’s so great a genius! Think of be¬ 
ing the best friend of such a man! How I 
envy you!” 

The words rang true; and she could not 
more certainly have increased my admira¬ 
tion and respect for her. 

“Poor devil!” I burst forth. “He’s eat- 



168 The Girl Next Door 


ing his heart out these days! There’s no 
better artillery officer in the British forces, 
but they won’t give him his head! He’s 
slaving day in, day out, to induce the British 
War Office to adopt the French methods of 
range finding and shell distribution—but 
they simply won’t. I’d a letter from him 
two weeks back; God knows how it got by 
the censor, but it did. ‘We’re wasting half 
our shells,’ he groaned. I could hear him. 

‘And those damned fools-’ Oh, I beg 

your pardon!” 

“Why?” laughed Miss Miniter. “They 
are damned fools, aren’t they? Do go on!” 

Two evenings later I crossed the hall and 
tapped at Miss Miniter’s door. 

“Now you’re in for it,” I announced, “no 
matter how busy you are. I shall talk for 
hours probably. Are you ready?” 

“Shoot,” said Miss Miniter. 



XVI 


I HAD supposed the extreme limit of 
my stay at Oakdale Terrace would be 
perhaps a month, but I had not been 
there two weeks before I realized that I was 
in for a longer period of exile. In the first 
place, I was making little progress with 
my attempts to overcome Bela’s curiously 
stubborn reserve. The boy was polite, but 
formal; and I was presently, by various 
subtleties of manner, made aware that he 
resented my intrusion into the happy family 
of the Kingerys. In the second place— 
well, I can now see how far my decision to 
make haste slowly was due to the fact that 
I already much preferred living across the 
hall from Miss Miniter to living in the same 

apartment with Laurestine. However, it 

169 



170 The Girl Next Door 


was not until a full month had passed that 
I began to feel the disturbing connection 
between Bela’s reserve and my rapidly in¬ 
creasing interest in and admiration for Mis9 
Miniter. 

Mrs. Kingery was the clear source of my 
enlightenment. I went to her one mid- 
moming to pay my weekly bill, and finding 
her alone in her kitchen I stopped to chat 
with her. 

“Mrs. Kingery,” I asked bluntly, “why 
doesn’t Bela like me? I’ve never been more 
strongly drawn to anyone, and it hurts me 
—it really does—not to be able to make 
friends with him.” 

“Poor lad!” was her enigmatic response. 

“Of course,” I persevered, “he’s had a 
mighty hard life for a sensitive, talented 
boy—what you and Miss Miniter have told 
me about him explains a good deal. Then, 
his work must be hopeless drudgery to him 
—a constant drain on his spirits. He wor- 


The Girl Next Door 171 

ries about his mother, too, I suppose, all the 
time?” 

“He does,” sighed Mrs. Kingery. 

“Naturally. It’s not difficult to under¬ 
stand his depression, and I marvel at the 
way he keeps it under. But it’s a terrible 
thing for a boy like that to consume all his 
own smoke! If I could only win his con¬ 
fidence somehow — I’m sure I could help 
him.” 

“I’m sure,” echoed Mrs. Kingery. “But 
there’s more than all that to it, Mr. Ellwood 
—there’s more back of it all—there’s a thing 
I don’t understand—and there’s a thing I 
do.” She looked at me doubtfully a moment. 
“Maybe it’s not right for me to say it—but 
we’re all friends here I hope, thank God— 
we mean well by each other. Mr. Ellwood, 
the poor lad’s in love—sunk, he is—it’s the 
last straw for him, you might say—and not 
a word out of him! Aha, Mr. Ellwood, 
many’s the lad his age goes head over heels 





172 The Girl Next Door 


for a grown woman and plays the fool, and 
no harm done! The crazier they act the 
soonest mended! But Bela keeps his head, 
worse luck—and holds his tongue—why, I 
don’t know—but there’s a reason behind, 
God help him—and he’ll never be rid of it 
all with a black lump on his heart like a 
cobble. It’s what I say to Kingery and he 
after me, Tf that lad don’t blow off steam 
one day, he’ll burst and die of it.’ ‘And he 
will, too,’ says Kingery.” 

“What makes you think he’s in love, Mrs. 
Kingery? I’ve been studying the boy for a 
month, and I’ve never suspected it.” 

“Why would you—you least of all?” she 
replied. “He’d be crucified first. Well he 
knows when you and Miss Miniter visit to¬ 
gether. That’s what stands between you 
and him, Mr. Ellwood—you asked and I’m 
telling you—though God help me, what 
Kingery’d say if he heard me—it’s not to be 
pictured—it is not, indeed! And thank you 





The Girl Next Door 173 

kindly for the money, Mr. Ellwood—I’m a 
lucky woman the way I’m paid prompt and 
regular—and so Kingery says night and 
morning, the poor man—for nobody works 
harder I” 

It was a gentle dismissal; but I made 
what my friend Pennington, the stage di¬ 
rector, calls, with artistic shudders, a false 
exit—that is, I halted in the doorway, then 
turned back. 

“Mrs. Kingery,” I demanded, almost 
sharply, “does Miss Miniter know that Bela 
is in love with her?” 

In spite of herself, I think, Mrs. Kingery 
giggled. “God help the men!” she giggled; 
then blushed, turning her face from me. 
“Don’t take it wrong, Mr. Ellwood; but 
Kingery, he’d ask the same in your shoes; 
and so would the Holy Father himself, poor 
man—meaning no disrespect to him—or 
you neither!” 

It was impossible to misinterpret this 


174 The Girl Next Door 


reply; nevertheless I took it up to my room 
with me, and there pondered it. And the 
more I pondered it, the less I liked the in- 
* tolerable situation it revealed. 


XVII 

I T is an intolerable situation, is it not, 
to find yourself your son’s rival, what¬ 
ever the environing circumstances may 
happen to be? But if, in addition to being 
his rival, you are also still legally the hus¬ 
band of his mother—a mother he adores; if, 
too, he doesn’t know you are his father; and, 
finally, if you happen to be the creature 
whom—in idea, at least, and for his mother’s 
sake—he hates with a yearning hatred and 
thinks it his duty to find some day and kill 
—surely “intolerable” is a very weak word 
to cover such tragically grotesque facts as 
these! There is only one word to cover 
them—“improbable”; and that word is use¬ 
less to me. For when the improbable has 

happened — why, there it is! It exists. 

175 



176 The Girl Next Door 


And you can’t escape from the actual by 
calling it a bad dream; though many a poor 
devil has tried to do so, and will again, to 
the end of dreamers and all bad dreaming! 

I did some intensive thinking throughout 
the rest of that swiftly passing day. I 
isolated all the above stubborn facts and 
many more, stated them to myself with 
laconic frankness, then examined them in 
all their bearings, minutely. It was a sort 
of inquest upon the contents of my private 
consciousness, and not unsalutary. And 
one fact loomed like a granite cliff: I saw 
that if I were free I should presently ask 
Miss Miniter to be my wife; for she was 
already, as no woman had been before her, 
at home in what I can only call my mind’s 
estate—that varied tract, half cultivated, 
half savage, which my ego had partly in¬ 
herited, partly conquered, and had wholly 
walled in from the intrusion of casual tres¬ 
passers. Miss Miniter, from the first, had 



The Girl Next Door 177 


known the password to this domain, and 
had entered there as one for whom both the 
tended paths and the wild land had long 
been waiting. And the far lovelier walled 
gardens of her own estate, by some happy 
fatality, neighbored mine. It would be a 
simple matter to throw them together and so 
at one and the same time widen our bound- 
aides and banish loneliness. That is, it 
might conceivably have been a simple mat¬ 
ter, if a certain rough overlord, named Duty, 
had had no interest in the transaction. But 
he had—and insisted upon obedience in his 
boorish, autocratic way. 

As he pointed out, harshly, there were 
prior claimants. There was Laurestine; 
and the problem of Laurestine was not a 
simple one. It was inextricably snarled up 
with the whole major problem of my obliga¬ 
tions to, and my strong and increasing af¬ 
fection for, Bela Hrdlika, her son and mine. 
If there had been no Bela, indeed, I should 


178 The Girl Next Door 


hardly have felt that a problem existed. 
The mere conventions of life have little hold 
upon me; less perhaps than they deserve. 
My morality, such as it is, is founded, I like 
to think, on the sincerity of my human re¬ 
lations. I choose to base my conduct on 
facts, not on technicalities; and that Laures- 
tine had remained my wife in any save a 
legalistic sense would never have occurred to 
me. She had no love for me, nor I for her, 
and my one remaining duty toward her was 
to provide for her reasonable comfort. 
Under these conditions she would easily, I 
knew, consent to divorce if—if, again, there 
had been no Bela. But there, unmistak¬ 
ably and appealingly, he was; and his devo¬ 
tion to Laurestine, however unworthy its 
object, was another fact like a granite 
mountain. 

And a third, equally solid, I feared, was 
his boyish passion for Miss Miniter; his con¬ 
sequent instinctive jealousy of me. Why, 


The Girl Next Door 179 


I asked myself, had he not impulsively 
poured out this pent fiery stream in a lava- 
torrent of words? Until he had done so, 
honest boy-fashion, there was little hope for 
his recovery. A too mature will was sub¬ 
jecting his physical and nervous immaturity 
to an intolerable, to—quite possibly—a fatal 
strain. Why? 

There could be, I felt, but one answer. 
He, too, was obeying a mandate of the 
rough overlord; a false mandate, surely; or 
a true mandate misunderstood. He con¬ 
ceived himself to be—yes, in this twentieth 
century—dedicated to revenge. He was 
living up to a romantic, a medieval ideal of 
family honor, doubtless early planted in his 
child’s soul by Anton Hrdlika, that madly 
romantic Czech! Hate, then, under given 
circumstances, was a noble passion, to be 
cherished and blindly served. Served by a 
deed—a just deed! Until that was accom¬ 
plished love could have no place in Bela’s 



180 The Girl Next Door 


life, was an intruder there; he must trample 
it down and pass over it to the appointed 
goal. 

Thus the nature of my task, the full scope 
of my duty, became obvious; but how to 
fulfill that duty, accomplish that task? 
Placed—cornered, rather; hemmed in—as I 
found myself, was it not beyond my poor 
wit and strength? In the bright lexicon of 
youth there is, perhaps, no such word as 
“fail”; but in the thumbed lexicon of forty? 
Is it not scrawled there across every page? 

My head throbbed, my heart ached with 
staggering questions. 

How to save Bela from the curse of his 
parents’ past misdeeds, from their blunder¬ 
ing weakness? How to save Bela from the 
curse of his childhood’s environment, his 
damnable upbringing? How to save Bela 
from Laurestine’s folly, from Anton’s folly, 
from my own folly and neglect? How, 
above all, to save him from the living sum 


The Girl Next Door 181 


of all these influences? How to save him 
from himself? 

Could I do it? Was it not years too late? 
Could I save his reason, his very life? 
Could I save his great undeveloped talent 
—a natural endowment so much finer than 
my own, yet so strangely sprung from it? 
Could I save this for its true development, 
and for the world? 

Miss Miniter had let me examine a series 
of designs by Bela, unshaded outlines made 
with an ordinary pencil; and though they 
were technically imperfect—the drawing of 
the figure being especially faulty—they 
were troublingly beautiful, already far be¬ 
yond me in authentic imaginative power. 
Could I save all this? 

Well; I could try. I could begin, at 
least, by forgetting myself in him. At 
forty, if ever, one can make these renuncia¬ 
tions of a private impracticable dream. But 
even at forty one is not apt to be a saint or 


182 The Girl Next Door 

a superman. For saint or superman, doubt¬ 
less, to renounce is to renounce; for ordi¬ 
nary clay, renunciation has its nuances , its 
pitiful degrees toward finality. One re¬ 
nounces—and hopes against hope; so, pres¬ 
ently, it is all to do over again, and one 
renounces once more. 

I did not cross the hall that evening, nor 
the three following evenings, to chat with 
Miss Mirriter. 

On the fifth evening it was Miss Miniter 
who crossed the hall to me. 


XVIII 


S HE seated herself, rather stiffly for 
Miss Miniter, on the outer third of a 
straight bedroom chair. “I’ve been 
thinking over all you told me,” she began, 
“and I’ve come to ask whether you regret 
having told me?” 

“No!” I exclaimed. 

“I thought possibly you did. You well 
might, you know. And you’ve been rather 
pointedly dodging me for several days.” 

“Yes,” I answered pretty miserably, “I 
have. And I shall have to go on dodging 
you, as pointedly as possible, if I’m ever to 
win Bela’s confidence.” 

“Why?” 

“The boy’s jealous of our friendship. It’s 


184 The Girl Next Door 

a wretched situation; but I fear there’s no 
doubt of it.” 

Miss Miniter’s face cleared; the lines of 
her body relaxed a little. 

“I’m glad you have so much insight,” she 
said. “For a man, you’re frighteningly in¬ 
tuitive. It would have been awkward to 
have to tell you Bela’s in love with me—at 
his age—and mine! But since you’ve dis¬ 
covered it for yourself—” 

“With Mrs. Kingery’s help,” I acknowl¬ 
edged. 

“Oh. Then you’re not quite so wonder¬ 
ful, after all!” She smiled faintly; but 
for the first time since I had known her 
she seemed painfully ill-at-ease. A silence 
lengthened between us and grew oppressive. 

“How absurd!” she cried out at last. “I 
believed my silly nerves under better con¬ 
trol. Why should I feel embarrassed with 
you, or you with me? I won’t—and you 
mustn’t any more!” 



The Girl Next Door 185 


“My dear/’ I replied, “we both feel em¬ 
barrassed—because we love each other and 
haven’t had the courage to say so.” 

“You’ve had—now!” she gasped. Two 
sharp flares leaped up in her cheeks. “And 
it’s true. There! Now we’ve both had. 
But we’ve found each other so much too 
late. It’s a queer, sad, middle-aged failure 
for us, man of mystery. We’re old enough 
to stand up to it, that’s one good thing. 
And we can work together a little while; 
we can have that much. We can work to¬ 
gether—for Bela.” 

I went to her and bowed over her hands, 
kissed them. “Thank you, dear.” 

It left the two bright spots of color 
in her cheeks and a suspicion of tears in 
her eyes. We sat, calmly, and advised to¬ 
gether. It was as if we had been married 
for many years. 


XIX 


S ADIE HAT, the girl next door, was 
disgruntled. She could no longer 
stomach the fact that Bela, though he 
lifted his cap whenever he passed her, 
ignored — to supply the words she needed 
—her very existence. But she’d learn him 
somethin’, so she promised herself, one of 
these days! Somethin’ to chew on! 

And there was an added annoyance gath¬ 
ering like mildew on her jelly like mind. 

One night, from the cigarette-strewn floor 
of the front porch, she had picked up an 
appropriately soiled copy of the Evening 
Primrose, abandoned there by her gen’le- 
man friend. Sadie seldom read a news¬ 
paper, having little time to spare for any 
phase of contemporary history not self-pro¬ 
jected; when she did read one she always 

186 


The Girl Next Door 1B7 


turned first to those special columns of ad¬ 
vice to the sentimental, and so passed on to 
glance through the personal notices. “Toot¬ 
sie. Love and kisses. Wootsie.” It was a 
satisfaction to her, though a dull one—for 
she lacked the power of dramatizing sug¬ 
gestions—to read such items. In a muzzy 
way, they revived in her the primitive sense 
of herd solidarity; made her feel she was 
part of the real central microcosm—one of 
the regular bunch! She, too, belonged. 

On that particular evening, in that not 
always particular journal, her eye fell upon 
a brief notice already familiar to us: 

“Present address of Bela Hrdliha de¬ 
sired . Answer , P. O. Booc - Trenton, 

N. J. B. B.” 

The perusal of this brief notice had per¬ 
haps given her the one authentic literary 
sensation of an unimaginative life. 



188 The Girl Next Door 


Bela Hrdlika was wanted, was he? In 
the circle of Sadie’s experience no one was 
ever wanted except by the police. She con¬ 
strued the notice by instinct as proof posi¬ 
tive of a criminal and disgraceful past. 
She hugged the thought. And she did 
more. She got out her best pink note- 
paper. It was her hope that she alone in 
all Oakdale Terrace had seen that notice; 
and apparently this wild hope was justified. 

Having dispatched her information to the 
mysterious B. B., she waited, gloating, for 
some response—and for Bela’s inevitable 
doom. But no response came; and Bela 
went on about his business and continued to 
treat her like dirt. Also, a new grievance 
appeared, a new boarder at Mrs. Kingery’s 
—the damnedest old grouch she’d ever run 
up against! Alius there at his window 
writin’ som’pn—an’ if he wasn’t a spy she 
missed her guess! She’d give him a frien’ly 
eye when he first come, too—even if he did 




The Girl Next Door 189 

have both feet in the grave. She’d even 
called up to him an’ been fresh. A girl 
couldn’ do no more’n that, could she! An’ 
then the ol’ stiff had ast her why she chewed 
gum! She’d gum him all right! See if she 
didn’t! 

Well, she soon had her chance. Fate, be¬ 
lieved in occasionally by all sensible men, 

had arranged all the details for her. 

* 

One muggy August morning the ol’ stiff 
received a letter, a troubling letter, from 
Laurestine. Having read it and anxiously 
pondered it, he carelessly left it, when he 
descended to lunch, on the table by his open 
window. A passing riffle of air removed 
it from the table and wafted it downward to 
the side yard. Sadie Hat was not working 
that day at the button factory in Hacken¬ 
sack ; she had had wind of even more fantas¬ 
tic wages at a munitions plant in Paterson 
and was taking two or three days off to 
celebrate her approaching affluence. Her 


190 The Girl Next Door 


idea of beginning a holiday properly was to 
loll in bed at least until noon, half dozing 
through the last hour or two, and savoring 
voluptuously the door-dulled sounds of her 
mother clattering about below stairs doing 
the work. 

Thus Sadie had just risen and was yawn¬ 
ing deliciously at her window, which gave 
upon the side yard, when the slight but pre¬ 
destined force detached Laurestine’s letter 
from my table. Sadie saw it waver out 
from my window and zigzag down to the 
softening asphalt; her curiosity was instant¬ 
ly awake; she ceased to yawn. Since the 
oF stiff was alius writin’ som’pn, it might be 
as well to see just what the ol’ stiff was alius 
writin’. She slipped on a magenta kimono, 
thrust her flat feet into electric-blue mules 
tipped with orange pompons, and so left her 
room to glide softly down the back stairs. 
And if you ask me how I know all this, 
please remember that Miss Miniter herself 


The Girl Next Door 191 

once pronounced me frighteningly intui¬ 
tive. 

Safe in her room again with her treasure- 
trove, Sadie Hat plumped herself into the 
middle of her mussed-up bed and painfully 
spelled out the following communication: 

“When you read these lines, dear Alfred, 
I shall be on my way to San Francisco with 
Li Po. In all my life no one has ever been 
so nice to me as Li Po. We have left the 
apartment in perfect order. All my bills 
are paid, and there is nothing to worry you. 
Li Po has drawn on your account for me— 
$5000. He did not like to do this, but I told 
him you wouldn’t wish me to be unprovided 
for, so at last he agreed. He says it over¬ 
draws your account a little—three or four 
hundred dollars—but the bank has paid the 
check. I do hope this won’t inconvenience 
you, Alfred; but I’m sure it will not, you 
are so very rich nowadays. I’m very grate- 


192 The Girl Next Door 


ful for all you have done for me, and I know 
it will be a relief to you to feel free again. 
You never really understood me, Alfred. 

“It breaks my heart to leave Bela, per¬ 
haps forever—but he is young and has his 
own life to live, hasn’t he? And that’s a 
little how I feel, too. After all, Alfred, I’m 
still young—and when you remember all 
I’ve suffered! Tout comprendre, cest tout 
pardonnerriest-ce-pas, Alfred? I mean 
to be very happy with Li Po, if he will 
always be as nice to me. One is entitled 
to a little happiness from life. Isn’t that 
true? 

“You are making a great mistake, mon 
ami , not to tell Bela who you are and that 
he is really your son. Perhaps what I am 
doing now will make this easier for you—as 
Li Po pointed out to me over and over. 
That’s the real reason he was able to per¬ 
suade me to make this sacrifice. For, when 
you think of it that way, it is a sacrifice. 


The Girl Next Door 193 


I’d like you and Bela to think of it that 
way—especially Bela. 

“I’m sure he will grow to love you, Al¬ 
fred, for you have the power to do so much 
for him; and that’s certain to tell in the end. 
I shall not write again, Alfred, unless all 
my hopes should be blighted. As Li Po 
says, £ To-day the Pavlovnia blossom, and to¬ 
morrow the Stone Castle.’ It must be a 
quotation, but he can be very poetic himself. 
Besides, what is the use of going on with an 
impossible situation? And I have suffered 
too much. It has made me timid, Alfred. 
At the last moment my heart almost fails 
me. Adieu, mon ami . Tell Bela his un- 
fortunate mother will never forget him. 

Laurestine.” 

That Sadie Hat grasped all the implica¬ 
tions of this extraordinary letter at a first 
or even a third reading is improbable. It 
is more probable, indeed, that she never 



194 The Girl Next Door 

grasped them at all. To have done so suc¬ 
cessfully would have required a mental 
alertness that is not hers. But it brought 
to her adapted nostrils a fascinating whiff 
—carrion. All was not sound and sweet in 
Denmark—that much she made out quite 
easily; and something unpleasant, perhaps, 
might come of it—something unpleasant for 
Bela, or the o V stiff, or both. But what to 
do? 

I will not pretend it is clear to me why, 
that very afternoon, she did precisely what 
she did do. Abstractedly that day I had 
pecked at a bite of lunch with Mrs. Kingery 
and the children, and had returned to my 
room to reconsider Laurestine’s letter for 
the twentieth time since breakfast. It was 
obvious to me that I must take some action 
in the matter at once, but what action to take 
was far from obvious. Thus far I had made 
but one decision—to meet Miss Miniter at 
her accustomed train and place Laurestine’s 


The Girl Next Door 195 


letter in her hands. It would, of course, be 
impossible for me to take any action without 
first consulting Miss Miniter. 

Two hours of the long hot afternoon} 
passed before I was able to convince myself 
that Laurestine’s letter was gone—gone be¬ 
yond recovery. Though not ordinarily a 
patient man, I ransacked my pockets and 
every nook of my small room over and over; 
then the possibilities of the open window 
struck me, and I hastily descended to the 
side yard, and, radiating thence in every di¬ 
rection, I combed the neighborhood. 

The Kingery children assisted me, and 
the smaller Hats. I had lost an important 
letter, I told them; I had left it on my table 
and it must have eddied out from my win¬ 
dow; but the air was so heavy, so still, it 
could not have been carried far. I described 
the appearance of the letter and offered a 
reward, trifling in itself, but sufficient to 
bring most of the Fuschia Street gang about 


196 The Girl Next Door 


my heels, eager for the quest. Mrs. Kingery 
herself bustled out from her kitchen from 
time to time and poked about with me under 
barberry hedges and behind garbage pails. 
And at last even the girl next door in person 
descended, wearing a knee-length skirt and 
a waist which can best be described as in¬ 
visible, and lolled about in our wake, asking 
what I had lost, and saying: “Ain’t it a 
shame the way things act like that?” 

Then she too—while the attention of Fus- 
chia Street was directed to me and my ex¬ 
asperation—disappeared. She slipped into 
Mrs. Kingery’s empty house, found her way 
to Bela’s room, opened his unlocked door, 
and placed Laurestine’s letter, unfolded, 
and anchored by the soap dish, on his wash- 
stand. There she knew it would be certain 
to catch his eye. What would happen then 
she could not know, but she must rather 
blindly have hoped it might be something 
dramatic and disagreeable, something worth 


Xhe Girl Next Door 197 

her while. She then descended calmly to 
Fuschia Street and rolled on her lolling way 
to Mitchell’s drug store, there to consume a 
banana-split and pass the time with what¬ 
ever idle apprentice might prove available. 

Miss Miniter saw her there about four 
o’clock. Miss Miniter had come out from 
town earlier than her wont and had stopped 
in at Mitchell’s for a small flask of smelling 
salts. The heat had given her a slight head¬ 
ache, which, if not thus far humored, she felt 
might prejudice her against the physically 
heavy manuscript in her bulging portfolio. 
Another novel—but doubtless the same old 
thing! She had promised herself to glance 
it through before morning. 

It was a promise the stars had promised 
themselves she could not keep. However, 
the small flask of smelling salts was not 
wholly wasted. 


XX 


I HAD given up my search and was just 
leaving the house to meet Miss Miniter’s 
train, when she came up Fuschia Street 
with her heavy portfolio and her little pack¬ 
age. I saw at once that she was suffering, 
and she saw at once that I was greatly wor¬ 
ried; so we both smiled and dismissed for 
the moment our own troubles in concern for 
each other. 

“It’s really nothing,” I said; “it can wait 
at least until after dinner. Now you must 
lie down for an hour.” 

“But I couldn’t rest properly now,” she 
insisted. “I should worry — which would 
help neither of us.” 

I had followed her to her door. There we 

paused, and I told her briefly the contents 

and fate of the vanished letter. “And now 

198 


/ 


The Girl Next Door 199 

promise me to try for a nap,” I ended. 
“After dinner, if you’re up to it, we’ll talk 
it all over and come to a decision.” 

“Bela will have to be told everything— 
to-night,” she replied. “That much is clear.” ' 

“Yes. But the telling — so infinitely 
much depends on that!” 

“I shall tell him,” said Miss Miniter, 
firmly. “Men always do such things as 
crudely as possible.” 

I shook my head. “No, dear. He’d think 
it cowardice on my part. So it would be, 
too. Why not have a bite of dinner brought 
up to you, when it’s ready? I can bring it. 
It won’t make Mrs. Kingery any extra 
trouble.” 

She shook her head slightly, in turn. 

“No; I’ll be all right—when I’ve fresh¬ 
ened up a little. My headache was largely 
imaginary—an excuse to quit work. But I 
mean it.” She laid her hand on my arm re¬ 
assuringly and met my eyes. “Don’t you 


200 The Girl Next Door 


worry—please! I know I can make Bela 
understand.” 

With that, for an hour or more, we 
separated. 

When dinner was announced Miss Min- 
iter came down from her room, cool and 
sparkling. She had put on a pretty summer 
frock of pale, crisp-looking pineapple-cloth 
—a South Sea Island fabric, she explained, 
sent to her by a Hawaiian friend, once her 
college roommate. It had the delicate 
tawny frost-bloom of iced champagne, and 
Mrs. Kingery — wilted for once, poor 
woman, by her day-long labors—was in ec¬ 
stasies over it, and said it was just as good 
as a sea breeze and maybe better. 

Bela, as it happened, was late; he entered 
the house just as Kathleen was performing 
her cherished function of trying out varia¬ 
tions on the three notes of the little dangling 
Chinese gong that hung from the ceiling 
in the front hall, right above the newel post. 



The Girl Next Door 201 

Kathleen had to mount three steps in order 
to reach this gong, and Bela, meeting her 
there, seized her hands and jumped her 
down them; then hurried on up to his room. 
They were not to wait for him, he had called 
to Kathleen; he’d have to change every¬ 
thing. 

“He’s all sweaty, you see!” superfluously 
explained Kathleen. 

“I’ve said before, and I’ll say it again,” 
protested Kingery, “that lad’s too vain of 
his good looks! He’ll be primping for half 
an hour now, just like a girl!” Kingery was 
himself that hot evening—and very wisely, 
I think—in his shirt sleeves; but in spite of 
the temperature we dined on pork chops and 
mashed potatoes with gravy. Kingery was 
not one to suffer any falling off from the 
substantial simply out of respect for the 
thermometer. “A day’s work’s a day’s 
work* winter or summer!” was his way of 
looking at it. “A laborin’ man can’t live on 


202 The Girl Next Door 


greens!” Mrs. Kingery, however, had pro¬ 
vided a crisp salad for the comparative 
idlers; that was her way. 

Dinner was almost over now and Bela 
had not descended. “Is there maybe some¬ 
thin’ wrong with the lad?” suggested Mrs. 
Kingery. “Bun up, do, Dennis, and see!” 

Dennis ran up and quickly returned. 
“He don’t want no dinner,” affirmed Den¬ 
nis. “He says he ain’t feelin’ right.” 

“It’s the heat,” pronounced Kingery, 
weightily, as if that settled the matter. Miss 
Miniter sped me a single questioning glance. 

“I’ll go and find out,” said Mrs. Kingery; 
“I’d better have gone first off.” 

“There’s nothing to find,” grumbled 
Kingery. “It’s the heat, mother—he’s off 
his feed. Let the lad be now!” 

“I’ll go and find out, all the same,” said 
Mrs. Kingery. 

But she returned with little more for us 
than Dennis had obtained. “He’s lyin’ on 


The Girl Next Door 203 


his bed, poor boy—his face to the wall. His 
head’s hot, too. But he says he’s all right 
and please not to disturb him.” There was 
a trouble in Mrs. Kingery’s eyes, and I 
thought she avoided my glance. 

“It’s the heat, woman,” reaffirmed King- 
ery. “Now sit down, do, and act more sen¬ 
sible. The lad’ll sleep it off. You can make 
him a cup of tea later on.” 


XXI 

A FTER dinner Kingery took to the 
front porch and a stogy, and his host¬ 
ages to fortune ran out into the street 
to play. Mrs. Kingery began that nightly, 
endless process known as clearing up. Miss 
Miniter went straight upstairs to see what 
could be done for Bela, and I followed her 
as far as my room. She soon rejoined me 
there, unobtrusively closing the door, and 
motioning me to draw down the window 
shade. 

“Bela is pretending to be asleep,” she in¬ 
formed me quietly, but unable to conceal 
the sharp anxiety in her eyes. “I’m certain 
it’s only a pretense. Your letter is lying on 

the floor beside his bed. Now I shall go 

204 


.The Girl Next Door 205 

back to him. I’ll take my clinical ther¬ 
mometer with me as an excuse.” 

“My letter? You must be mistaken.” 

“No. While I bent down to him I was 
able to turn it over with the toe of my slip¬ 
per. I made out several lines of it, quite 
clearly. Oh, Alfred! All this—it’s so piti¬ 
ful—and terrible! For Bela, I mean! Poor 
child! It’s impossible to imagine what this 
will do to him. He mustn’t be left alone 
now. But I felt you should be warned first, 
Alfred.” 

“I’m the one to go to him,” I said; “not 
you.” 

She had backed against the door as if to 
keep me from it, and I saw fear grip her 
with white fingers and squeeze the blood 
drop by drop from her face. 

“It isn’t fair to him,” she whispered. 
“Not yet. He’s had nothing to help him 
understand. That’s my part. I can help 
him to understand.” 


206 The Girl Next Door 

I shook my head. “I’m not afraid of my 
son, dear! I’m afraid for him. And I’ve 
stood aside too long, as you see.” 

She did see, of course—being Miss Min- 
iter. She felt with me and acknowledged 
all that impelled me toward Bela. She sum¬ 
moned the full strength of her spirit and 
poured it into me with a clear, confident 
glance. 

“After all,” she said, “what is it I’ve been 
fearing? What silly bugaboos we conjure 
up!” She opened the door for me and stood 
aside. 

And as she opened the door and stood 
aside, a long piercing note, sharply attacked 
and abruptly broken—a stiletto stroke of 
sound—stabbed through us like the ice-flash 
of neuralgic pain. It was followed by an 
ascending series of deep, firm, menacing 
chords; and again the sharp, high-pitched 
note struck at us as a snake strikes, once. 

Bela was playing, then. 



The Girl Next Door 207 


We stood, side by side, squeezed into the 
narrow doorway of my room, rigid; and, I 
know not how, Miss Miniter’s hand was 
crushed mercilessly in mine. 

Bela was playing. 

I have never heard the like of that harsA 
triumphing music. It was the implacable. 
And again those menacing chords, and the 
high-pitched cry! 

I released the hand in mine, walked 
quickly to Bela’s door, opened it, and went 
in, shutting the door behind me. 

The boy was not three paces from me. 
Bow and fiddle dropped to his sides. His 
eyes bit deep, but he spoke quietly. 

“Now I am going to kill you,” he said. 


XXII 


Y 


OUR father?” 

“I have none.” 


He threw the violin and bow aside; 
let them bounce and clatter on the patch of 
bare floor between the two smaller patches 
of rag carpet. Then I saw an old-fashioned 
revolver lying on the washstand beside him, 
saw his fingers close on it and lift it. It is 
merely true that I felt no physical fear, so 
saturated was I with the horror of all he 
was bringing upon himself. He had never 
seemed to me so beautiful as in that mo¬ 
ment. It is not true that hate is always a 
disfiguring passion. Bela’s hatred of me 
had budded from an intense illusion; it was 
a flame-flower of pure romanticism — too 
exotic for Oakdale Terrace, or a machine- 
lathed modem world; but, for all that, 


208 


The Girl Next Door 209 

something great and shining lay back of it; 
something Kit Marlowe could have found 
immortal speech for; something Byron 
would have thrilled to and understood. 

“Don’t destroy yourself!” I cried. “I 
don’t matter—but you matter!” 

My heart stopped, fluttered, then crazily 
pounded; I could feel it tearing like a netted 
leopard against my ribs. A blind suffoca¬ 
tion loosened my knees. The life-giving air 
was sucked away from me—far off—very 
far—a wave ebbing from me with the rapid¬ 
ity of light. I tottered in a vacuum— 
choked—and pitched forward. The pistol 
spoke as I fell. 



XXIII 


S O it was for me, with my grotesque 
apology for a heart, that Miss Min- 
iter’s smelling salts were needed that 
night; and my account of what followed 
must be brief, being hopelessly secondhand. 

As I pitched forward into nothingness, 
Bela had fired. The bullet missed me, splin¬ 
tered and penetrated a panel of his door, 
and struck down Miss Miniter, who had 
crept thus far after me in a cold agony of 
apprehension. The half-spent bullet struck 
and shattered her left collar bone, glanced 
aside, and tore the flesh from her left shoul¬ 
der. She fell. 

Kingery, followed by Mrs. Kingery, 

came stumbling clumsily up the stairs. 

When he reached the upper hall, he saw Bela 

crouching over Miss Miniter. Then the boy 

210 


The Girl Next Door 211 


gathered her into his arms. He rose with 
her, carried her into her room, and laid her 
down with infinite care and gentleness on 
her bed. Kingery and Mrs. Kingery had 
crowded in at his heels. He faced them 
now, but Mrs. Kingery thinks he did not see 
them. He disregarded their confused out¬ 
cries. 

“Why does God hate me so?” were the 
words he uttered. His eyes were blank and 
strange. 

Then he, too, collapsed, dropping heavily, 
as if felled by a single crushing stroke from 
an invisible mallet. 

Weeks later Kingery commented to me 
upon this scene. “I oncet saw Mantell in 
Hamlet,” he said. “If I’d had more eddy- 
cation in me youth I’d ’a’ knowed enough 
not to go. When the stage was that thick 
with corpses there was no characters left— 
that ended the play. But take it from me, 
Mr. Elliman—it didn’t give me the turn I 


212 Xhe Girl Next Door 

got that night when you an’ Miss Miniter 
an’ the lad was all laid out cold to oncet! 
Hamlet was nothin’ to it! It was not in¬ 
deed! Nothin’ at all!” 



XXIV 


W ITHIN a week I was on my feet 
again; and Miss Miniter, her 
shoulder in a plaster cast, was rest¬ 
ing comfortably enough in bed. But Bela 
still lay stricken with a strange dumb leth¬ 
argy. The local doctor could find nothing 
wrong with him, and a famous specialist was 
called in by me from New York. I gave 
him freely all the facts in the case, and he 
studied Bela thoughtfully for two days. The 
boy was not unconscious, nor was he sham¬ 
ming unconsciousness; but his fine eyes were 
dazed and dull, without recognition, and no 
questioning, however persuasive, could draw; 
from him even an effort to respond. 

“It’s a hysterical condition of some kind,” 
pronounced the famous specialist, thereby 

tq his own satisfaction establishing his right 

213 


214 The Girl Next Door 


to a fantastic fee. “Frankly, I don’t know 
just what to make of it; but I dare say he’ll 
come out of it all right. Keep me in¬ 
formed.” 

For a period of six days Bela lay thus, 
without eating or drinking, and I sat beside 
him and talked to him constantly in a quiet, 
matter-of-fact way; telling and retelling 
him the story of his life and mine; going 
into details minutely; withholding nothing 
that I could remember or that I had cred¬ 
ibly been told or felt that I honestly under¬ 
stood. I was certain that in some sense he 
heard me; yet I was equally certain that he 
did not and could not consciously follow my 
quiet, unending monologue; and why I 
should have persisted is still something of 
a mystery even to me. The Kingerys, I 
fear, thought that I, too, had lost my wits, 
and were far from happy about Miss Min- 
iter’s because she openly approved of my 
persistence. 


The Girl Next Door 215 


“Nothing you tell him will be lost,” she 
affirmed. “It will make all the deeper im¬ 
pression. His utter passivity is your oppor¬ 
tunity; his mind lies like wax before you; 
you can rub out and write in what you will. 
Don’t grow discouraged,” she added; “don’t 
be turned aside. My intuition confirms 
yours, dear. I feel you are fighting for his 
reason; reorganizing and reenergizing a 
shattered soul. Some day soon he will know 
you and answer you, and it will all have 
come clear to him at last. I have faith in 
your fight, you see. You’ll win for him. 
You’re bound to win.” 

Thus, toward the end, it was really Miss 
Miniter’s faith that held me beside Bela, 
patiently recapitulating, reexplaining, hour 
after hour, day after dragging day. 

With the aid of the Kingerys and Miss 
Miniter, and by means of the most shame¬ 
less lying, I was able to persuade the local 
authorities that a shocking accident had oc- 


216 ,The Girl Next Door 

curred. Bela, I so far truthfully informed 
them, had an old-fashioned revolver of 
French manufacture, formerly belonging to 
his reputed father, Anton Hrdlika; before 
dinner on the night of the accident he had 
taken it out of his washstand drawer, as 
boys will, meaning to look it over and clean 
it and oil it up. When dinner was an¬ 
nounced he had laid it down on his wash- 
stand, and after dinner I had stopped at his 
room for a moment to chat with him, as I 
very often did, and had noticed the revolver 
and asked him about it. He had picked it 
up to show it to me and doing so had un¬ 
intentionally discharged it, not knowing of 
course that it was loaded; a corroborative 
detail which impressed our Gilbertian local 
authorities as adding artistic verisimilitude 
to an otherwise bald and unconvincing nar¬ 
rative. The ball had missed me, passing 
through a door panel and gravely injuring 
Miss Miniter, and so on. Bela was devoted 


.The Girl Next Door 217 

to Miss Miniter. When he had seen her ly¬ 
ing before him and supposed he had killed 
her—the result was a nervous shock whose 
results were still uncertain. And so forth, 
and so forth! 

The Gilbertian local authorities shook 
their heads, but it was obvious their relief 
was great! What with war abroad and 
mounting taxes and prices and drafts and 
drives at home, our local authorities were 
in no mood for additional responsibility. 
An accident, the result of gross carelessness 
—that is what Bela’s stern and intended 
deed of vengeance was officially pronounced 
by our local authorities to be! 

Amd one night, when for very weariness 
I had ceased talking quietly to Bela and sat 
beside him in a state of lethargy almost as 
profound as his own, he spoke; not loudly, 
yet his voice startled me as if it had been a 

cry. 

“Why do you want me to live?” he said. 


218 The Girl Next Door 


“Because I love you, boy. Because you 
have something to give the world.” 

“If you can make me believe that-” 

“You do believe it,” I affirmed. 

“Yes.” 



XXV 


W ELL, that, essentially, is Bela’s 
story, which is also Miss Miniter’s 
story, and mine. To tie off all the 
dangling threads of it now, with due artful 
precision, seems hardly worth the patience 
involved. I have written what I have writ-^ 
ten, these waiting weeks, merely to quiet the 
intolerable restlessness of many sleepless 
hours; and to-morrow I shall hand these 
scrawled pages to Miss Miniter and advise 
her to bum them. My care for them is over, 
as my fight for Bela is over. It has ended 
in victory—but a victory, so far 1 as my 
blurred eyes can discern, made possible 
quite as much by the ignorant malice of the 
girl next door as by Miss Miniter’s steady 
courage and quiet wisdom. And chance— 

what men call chance—has everywhere en- 

219 


220 The Girl Next Door 


tered in. These things are baffling. We 
live in a universe that answers no final 
questions. 

Within the week we shall leave Oakdale 
Terrace—Bela, Miss Miniter and I. For 
no one of us will it be easy to leave Mrs. 
Kingery; in faring farther we shall often, 
I have no doubt, fare greatly worse. But 
Mr. and Mrs. Kingery and the infant King- 
erys are to attend a quiet wedding some¬ 
where on the Eastern seaboard before an¬ 
other year has passed. Miss Miniter is then 
to become Mrs. Alfred Elliman; but Bela 
and I, when at home together, shall always 
call her Miss Miniter. There are names too 
precious for oblivion; they cannot be wholly 
lost or changed. 

It was rather weirdly amusing, I admit, 
to learn that Laurestine had stopped off 
with Li Po at Reno, to establish a residence 
and sue me for divorce. Li Po, it is rather 
touchingly confided, is temporarily passing 


The Girl Next Door 221 

as her chauffeur. True, Laurestine had 
failed to mention in her farewell letter that 
they were to make their trip westward in 
my car; but she referred to it quite casu¬ 
ally in a subsequent communication from 
Reno. She is welcome, poor child! And on 
my soul I am convinced that Li Po will be 
uncommonly nice to her—nicer than I had 
ever been or would again be likely to be. 
I am sorry, though, that Bela will always 
think of her too sadly, for she seems con¬ 
tent— and beyond a vague contentment 
what better is there in life for Laurestine? 

Li Po, she informs me, means to carry 
her off to China when her divorce has been 
granted, when the war is over—when such 
things can more easily be arranged! She 
has much to look forward to; and Li Po 
will not fail to arrange things neatly, of so 
much I feel assured. He should do well, 
too, in post-war China. It will prove a wide 
field for his talents, and it would not sur- 


222 The Girl Next Door 

prise me to learn of him later as dictator of 
the Central Chinese Soviet. But nothing, 
I feel, could much surprise me now in con¬ 
nection with Li Po—or Laurestine. 

And Germany is on the run at last! Only 
yesterday the great Ludendorff suggested 
an armistice. Victory is in the air. But 
Europe lies in ruins, and who of living men 
knows what the fruits of victory will be! 
Man, I repeat, lives in a universe that an¬ 
swers no final questions. 

As I scribble these perfunctory lines the 
girl next door has lolled into the side yard 
and is talking earnestly to Bat Pinsky, her 
gen’leman friend — immediate successor to 
the unhappy Bert. Bert, it seems, in spite 
of high hopes for him, has proved an im¬ 
possible piker after all! Far from making 
off with fifty thousand dollars in Liberty 
Bonds, he merely helped himself one eve¬ 
ning to a snappy little roadster—and, alas! 
the girl next door was not the girl he took 


iThe Girl Next Door 223 

with him on that fateful occasion. But he 
managed somehow to wreck the roadster, 
and to get caught with the goods quite liter¬ 
ally on him; and his explanation that he had 
merely borrowed the car for fun did not 
prove wholly acceptable to its uninsured 
owner. So Bert, innocent victim of circum¬ 
stance, is spending a few months elsewhere 
among appropriate companions; and the 
girl next door has wisely turned for solace 
to Bat, the Jersey Bantam—a guy so lucky 
as to be born with only four toes on his left 
foot, through which numerical error he has 
been saved from the draft and enabled to 
earn laurels and a modest income as the nif¬ 
tiest little scrapper for his weight, bar none, 
the Hackmatack Athletics have ever de¬ 
veloped. 

“Aw, Bat,” the girl next door is pleading, 
“wha’d’ya say we takes in a Broadway show 
t’-night, huh? Wha’d’ya say?” 

Shall I present myself at the window, bid 


224 The Girl Next Door 


her farewell, and thank her for all she has 
done for Bela, for Miss Miniter, and for 
me? 

Or shall I rather help in my small way to 
save this immature republic by dropping my 
wash bowl on her head? It is a weighty 
bowl; the largest and slipperiest I have ever 
handled. . . . 

No; on the whole, perhaps, I had better 
consult with Bela and Miss Miniter; for I 
can hear their voices now. They are coming 
together up the stairs. And Bela is laugh¬ 
ing. Bela is laughing! A boy’s true, un¬ 
forced laughter! 

It is the first time I have ever heard him 
laugh. 


JTIIE END 


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